Textual Media

I desire to have a proficient understanding of Textual Media and be able to put it all together.  However, the elements that are used to develop a textual game are a little confusing to me.  I can see the storylines and pattern of how the pages are structured, but the concepts of how you play the game are a bit fuzzy.  Maybe the time line and age are factors in how a person interacts with the subject matter.  In games, I see several sections: 1) the stories, 2) the characters, 3) the scenes, 4) the global structure, and 5) the art work, plus some times there is a less to be learned.    As a reader, character, and game player, I believe that there are some elements I am missing in my understanding that would make my experience with this new textual media a lot more exciting.

I choose to write about Stealing My Letters because it seemed alot more tame than the images which showed up on VORN and because the Stealing My Letters website seemed closer to the concept of hypertextual media.  At first I thought of the concept of a public chat room with all the different people using letters, only in this case two or three or more people just drag all the letters to the corner which I would compare to BOTs(automated advertisements for sex sites) that always pop up in chat rooms limiting communication.  The similarity that I found to hypertext is that there are constantly obstacles to the next path you want to take, which in many cases frustrate the reader to a point where you’d really rather not continue.  This was true for me in ZORK and Hitchhiker’s Guide.  As for other hypertexts such as afternoon, the reader has to adapt and be patient to try to get to the end just as in Stealing My Letters, you need a strategy and patience to get your word.

   The understanding VORN site was interesting, definately very visually appealing.  It was odd that the site linked to several personal sites across the net.  I do not read the magazine and so I would not know where to start with comparing.  Though, pehaps it is the variety of people interested in the magazine.  I found the collage of images inpiring as I love collage, the combining of many purposes designed for one particular marketing purpose (in this case).  Upon clicking into the sites I felt rather intrusive but honestly it was at times fun to look at other people’s messages to friends and whatnot and see the intended purposes of the image, if there was one in particular.  The most illusive images of fall leaves were In a language I could not read, I first assumed Japanese but just now I thought I don’t really know what Japanese looks like so it could be any of the languages with different letters from our own.  The resulting image was beautiful at times though more interesting on the pages with several images as opposed to four.  However, the text was obviously very disjointed as it is simply thoughts and musings of normal people.

"Understanding VORN" seems to be a lot different than a lot of the other examples of Textual Media that we’ve studied, since it relies mostly on the input of the internet rather than the input of the reader. The only interactivity that the reader has with this program is to press the "Shuffle" button to mix up the images, and the rest of the input the program does itself by pictures from various blogs on the Internet.

VORN also doesn’t provide the reader with any text to read, unless you click the picture and click to the link to the corresponding blog. The text there, however, was not created by the author of VORN, it was created by the blog user whose picture was pulled by the VORN program. The links also don’t give us any more depth or insight to the purpose of "VORN" – VORN does not have an underlying storyline. The only theme to this is that each picture is pulled from a blog because the picture name either starts with the letter "V", "O", "R", or "N".

This is interesting to play with, but it leaves the reader wondering – what is the purpose of this? The title, "Understanding VORN", also seems to be misleading – what exactly is there to understand? I went to the "About" section to find out, and what it told me was that "the chaotic, unpredictable nature of UNDERSTANDING VORN reflects the chaotic, unpredictable nature of VORN Magazine". As a reader, I would have never figured that out from just playing this game.

I was pondering just how much information "wordcount" could tell us about our current state of things.  That is, what the ranks of opposite words, and their use frequency, can tell us about our society.  For instance the words love and hate.  Does the fact that love has a rank of 384, and hate has a rank of 3107, tell us that we are more loving, or does it tell us that more people who write are practicing the romantic side of this art.  Does the fact that war is ranked 304 and peace is ranked 1155 tell us that more people are interested in war, or that this makes sense, seeing as how the world is constantly at war.  Man is ranked 142, and woman is ranked 393, does this tell us that man is more important than woman?  Or perhaps that man is more corrupt and therefore has more things written about him.  When you read the section "about wordcount"  the creator claims that much can be learned about our culture from this experimental project.  I feel that by looking at the rank of certain words, and their opposites, that a great deal can be uncovered about our society.  Girl is ranked 616 and boy is ranked 735, the frequency is reversed as maturity sets in, and the real workings of the world come into play, or just a strange, unimportant, and laughable point? 

After exploring around the website for Alternumerics I am still puzzle about the intent and purpose of the creation of alternumerics.  I am still trying to figure out how this website or the invention of laternumerics ties in with interactive fiction. 

Alternumerics seems to have artform or different ways to represented the typed (printed) alphabets and numbers.  It is another means to speak two different message in the same passage, similar to the idea of a coded message. I decoded the first paragraph in Self Portrait as a Font–Print, the art form have a message because I am curious about the original message behind the coded alphabet.  It turns out to be a message from a chinese zodiac superstition  stating, "Happy Belated Chinese New Years. It-s the year of the snake, so beware of weasely types and people who can swallow rodents whole".   The original message does not appear very awe inspiring, however going through the code, the alphabet representation have an undertone of apologies and excuses.  For example, the letter n stands for "apologize", s stands for "plain forget", r stands for "don’t mean it" and so on, giving the idea that the person writing the letter titled "Letter to a Friend Who Doesn’t Seem to Want to be My Lover" is full of apologies.  Nonetheless, the nonchalant message after the decoded phrases are taken out does not match with one another. 

A similarity I can make between alternumerics and interactive fiction is that both forms can be read at different layers and level.  Nonetheless, I cannot see how alternumerics is very interactive, for each letter of the alphabet already have a set representation of a phrase and didn’t change from reader to reader. 

Another splash of random color, another set of random lexia;  yet this "Color of Television" is painted with a purpose. The art appears, initially to me, as a mess of colors, confusing to the eye and unforgiving in its change of pace. This version this mode of textual media differs in most ways from the lexia I have examined in previous assignments. More color, I see, more LIFE, more energy it seems. Perhaps the others- Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, a story, or even Italo Calvino’s If on a Winters Night a Traveler- included a form of energy. Perhaps, the type of energy I speak of includes one that excludes a death of some kind, an adulterer or the word sex. Ha, perhaps I have failed to encounter ALL of the lexia this genre of textual media has to offer.

 

One portion of the text did, however, catch my attention.

“And now the agitating chaos on the many screens slows and settles. A pattern begins to emerge, clearer every second. It is a color wheel: red within blue, blue within green, green within white, white within red.

Gracefully and deliberately, the wheel begins to spin.”

The meaning of this kind of interaction between reader/creator and its audience is suspended in the very meaning of the title: The Color of Television. What is the color of television? Is it one solid layer of color, or is it a spectrum of colors, layer upon layer; is it this layer definition, this color of television that includes variable pieces, pigments of color that alone may seem questionable, but some how,forming togther the very picture we view regularly? Yes. This textual piece reflects the mechanics, the science that supports the very workings of a television screen. The entire picture, the make up of the projected image is composed of tiny pieces- just as each story each color or hue to the entire meaning of the story- creates, establishes the very scene that we, as the audience, is to gather from the picture. The pigments, PIXELS of color could be representative of the arrangments of placements of each lexia, lending to the meaning or thematic element of the story.

"You Do Not Know Us, Nor Do You Know Our World. Cyberspace Does Not Lie Within Your Borders. Do Not Think That You Can Build It, As Though It Were A Public Construction Project. You Cannot. It Is An Act Of Nature And It Grows Itself Through Our Collective Actions"

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The Color of the Television" by Moulthrop reiterates image of putting a jigsaw puzzle to describe one of many reading experiences in hypertext fiction.  With each new link comes a new piece of information that might or might not fit into the whole narrative.  Every new paragraphs one have to hunt and search for clues to try to make some sense of what is presented before our screen. Since three different narratives seem to be put together on the same lexia, sometime by hunting around one can find clues that contain semblance of previous narrative.

The different thing about this hypertext fiction from previous ones we have read in class are the little quotations and factual information outside of the fictional story narrative located on the side of the page.  Many of them explain the definition of hypertext fiction.  One of the quoations I found interesting is:

"Following" a link means leaving it for another lexia; "gathering" a relation means bringing things to a central place: whereas the disjunctive link is associated with travel, the conjunctive relation is associated with locus, with an inherently structured lexia." Link to Quotation

The above quotation encapusalate another experience of reading hypertext fiction.  The above quotation seem to differentiate between a disjunctive link and a conjunctive relation.  In this hypertext "The Color of Television", is he creating mainly disjunctive link or conjunctive relation?  Many times from one link to another it seems that the idea of gathering a relations instead of simply following a link.  Nonetheless, I think that it requires both to read hypertext fiction because one can passively follow a link to whereever it leads you, but if the information does not appear as expected one must gather the information there and save it for later to see if it fits into another part of the narrative. 

A readers may have to suspend a narrative from a certain characters for a while in order to gather more information surrounding the primary narrative one is reading to open more paths. As Moulthrop writes in another aside quoatation from the fictional narrative is,  "READING SHOULD BE A SEAMLESS AND UNINTERRUPTED EXPERIENCE. ITS CHOICES PROCEED FROM THE EXPRESSION OF POSSIBILITIES AS A NARRATIVE MEDIUM, AND DEPEND UPON THE COMPLICITY OF THE READER IN THE CREATION OF A NARRATIVE. READING IS DESIGN ENACTED." Link to quotation  Reading "should be seamless" but in hypertext fiction it is interrupted at almost every paragraph and the readers must gather up clues along the different lexia.

The Color of Television was an interesting hypertext for a few reasons.  First off, I found the actual writing itself to be pretty good.  At times, it reminded me a lot of Calvino, especially in the way that pages would end right at the climax, forcing you to click around to try and find the continuation.  It was also interesting that there were a few different stories going on at once, all on the same page, simply differentiated by color and text.  This allows the reader to either pick which story they want to try and follow, or to read each story but to know when they’re reading a different story.

My immediate thought when I opened The Color of Television was "wow, the design of this page isn’t very good".  As I read through the pages, I remembered that the page was designed in 1996, almost ten years ago.  When I continued to read, I realized that different colored text identified different stories, and that didn’t make the design so bad.  As a hypertext the design works, you can identify individual stories; you can find the links that take you to different lexia, etc.  I thought it would be interesting to see that site redesigned by today’s web design standards, and to see if it would have the same effect and impact as this original version.

 

Pax was slightly confusing.  I read the "about" page, so I had a slight idea of what I would see when I began to click through the page.  As I began to work my way through the page, I honestly got a little bit bored.  The amount of clicking necessary for the small amount of text received wasn’t giving me enough quite the satisfaction I was seeking.  Similar to The Color of Television though, it was easy to recognize when a different character was speaking, mainly because their face would pop up in the bottom right of the left segment of the screen as the new text popped up on the right side of the screen.  As I continued to click through Pax, I started trying to pay more attention to the words appearing and changing in the background.  It was hard to read the words in the background and keep track of the text appearing on the right side of the screen, but I was wondering if those two separate pieces of text had any relation.  That is to say, if what appeared in the background related to what was showing up on the right side of the screen.  I feel like I would need to spend a whole lot more time with Pax to figure out if the two pieces of text had any relation. 

The Color of Television has a lot of similarities to a lot of the other hypertexts that we have read so far this semester. First of all, there are many different storylines going on at once. Here, they are differentiated by different columns and different fonts, with both varying font type and font color. There are also hyperlinks that you can click that will take you to different places within the text. These hyperlinks are not only words, but also symbols. This hypertext also contains graphics within the text.

There seems to be a fragmented main storyline, broken up by a side column with quotations in it. The quotations have hyperlinks within them that take you to different places in the text. The hyperlinks within the text are symbols instead of words.

With most of the other hypertexts that we have read, such as "Hegirascope" and "Afternoon", different fragments or ‘pages’ of the text are given a separate page. In The Color of Television, many fragments are run on the same page, and the only way we can differentiate between them is the fact that either they have their own column or the text color is different.

Interestingly, like "Hegirascope" and "Afternoon", The Color of Television also seems to have a preoccupation with war, especially nuclear war.