The key to a medium is communication with its audience. The message of each medium is transferred from author to reader, producer to consumer in a sense. Through my own discovery at home or through a teacher’s instruction in school I have been introduced to the main message-delivering mediums: the novel, the movie, the poem, the online video, the speech, and the television show. Unless the message had been deeply hidden, these mediums made it clear what I, as its audience, should learn. They all had a overall lesson, moral or point to get across, and most did it simply by stating such and then supporting it.
Recently, however, I was introduced to another type of medium that failed to capture my intellectual attention long enough to get across its point, if there even was one. Shelly Jackson’s hyper-textual “Patchwork Girl”, mass produced in the form of a CD-ROM, could be related to a book on tape in that it relays a jumbled story not through pages, but through the screen of the reader’s computer. Yet, as each mouse click took me further into the links that uniquely altered what part of the story I read, I began to realize that this medium was far from any book on tape I had ever listened to, and the experience is nothing like that of a printed novel. I started the story over (went back to the title page) numerous times; I read words and I observed pictures, but I could never fully give my attention to this form of reading because it was not only confusing, but it was also not easy to follow. The reason why this medium appears to fall short of relaying a story that should fit together like a puzzle is because of the way Jackson put her story together. As a reader, a medium will engage my mind better if the message being delivered flows in a consequential fashion. I couldn’t logically follow where the links were taking me, nor could I make a completed story out of each different pathways that the title page lead to. The interactive, hyper-textual storyline that “Patchwork Girl” uses in an attempt to capture the reader like a novel in fact does just the opposite. Hypertext should not be perceived as a novel because its medium falls short of the main qualities of a novel that enable a reader to become engaged in the storyline.
The interactive storyline our electronic age has introduced as a new medium cannot acquire the same degree of remoteness that a printed novel can, for the most part, brag about. By remoteness I am referring to the experience of getting lost in a book, an experience I do not get when reading anything online. The highly mediated quality of hypertext takes away from the “get away” aspect of the novel in the sense that the web’s access “changes [the] perspective of [what] ‘faraway’ [means]” (120). With the click of the mouse the millions of connections to anything that has been updated to the World Wide Web is accessible; this closeness to anything and everything proves to be more of a distraction than one might think. With an interactive interface the mystery and excitement of getting lost in a book is lost because, unlike in printed novels, hypertext reveals the blueprints of the story. Novel’s gain their fame from the enthrallment of ‘getting lost’ and it is the lack there of in hypertext in which “the image [loses]…much of its…power” (120). No longer is the reader instantly immersed once he or she reaches the bottom of the page because now the screen can scroll on infinitely when reading a hypertext. The page has been replaced by a never-ending series of words in which the reader cannot fully become engulfed by the author’s storyline.
As the average reader has to focus more on picking his or her way through the links to discover the path they wish to be on, they are concentrating less on actually following the plot thoroughly. In a printed novel one page leads to the next; the succession creates a definite before and after to base the cycle of events upon. Hypertext on the other hand, “with [its] visual media [and lack of] detail and inner sequentially,” is a more disruptive form of reading (122). Because the electronic age rushes things along, its goal is to make everything simpler. The depth of a novel cannot be felt in a form of text that “hastens transitions” from one idea to the next; a story is meant to be something to dive into, not merely a walk in shallow water (121). The interactive storyline of hypertext almost eradicates the idea of sequence, seeing as following the same links each time still leaves nothing solidly behind as the viewer moves from one link to the next. As Birkerts would point out, hyper-textual stories have no sense of “history” and it is because of this very reason that hypertext comes of as less engaging (122). How is a reader supposed to continue devoting attention to a story that does not have layered information to support the next set of material the viewer arrives at?
Rather than leading the reader along a developed storyline, Jackson appears to set in front of us a maze rather than a individual pathway. Now there may be some readers that enjoy an interactive story where they become the storyteller; however, for me this is not the typical experience of a novel. When I make the time to sit down and read a book I am looking to be removed from the real world and placed into the mind of the author. I am almost disturbed by the number of links and choices that the hypertext offers to the point that I cannot enjoy the story that Patchwork Girl tries to, ironically, ‘patch’ together. A novel engages based upon the emergence into the text, the words, that when correctly assembled, form an almost light at the end of the tunnel feeling: guiding the reader forward towards the bright light, yet assisting the walk by placing the reader on an enclosed path. While hypertext, on the other hand, just presents a light shining in your face and pushes the reader into the blinding abyss: nothing is recognizable, you can’t turn back, and you have not a clue where you are going to end up. From my exploration of Patchwork Girl, it is not a novel. On the contrary, I feel that Shelly Jackson’s hypertext belongs to the next generation of what will be called books- that is if we still call them that. With my frequent interaction with ‘compposting’ on Word Press (a blog) it seems more relevant for me to relate Patchwork Girl to a specific blog rather than to a novel.
