Focusing on: Can Coherence Be Saved?
An intriguing read, I tend to agree with the author on most of the points expressed in this article. One theme that is visited repeatedly throughout the text is the idea of hypertext vs. the standard novel. Will hypertext replace novels in the future? Games, hypertext and interactive CD-ROMS are given as examples how they compare to a standard novel but also how they will most likely never replace it.
As stated in the text, most readers “read on” to find out what happens next in a novel, moving linearly, page-by-page, the reader knows what to expect at least in terms of context of a novel. With hypertext and other forms of electronic literature, you have multiple forms as are outlined in the end of the article. Some forms of electronic literature as defined by hypertext immersion, go way off, leaving the reader lost, which in turn relegates that piece of literature to academic study and not for the masses. Spatial immersion would seem a better choice giving the reader some context and control over the text itself. Followed by emotional immersion, which is described allowing the user to choose different outcomes based upon his or her own personal interests.
I have to concur with the conclusion of this piece. Currently, people usually books when they want to read a story. I do not believe interactive textuality is quite there yet in terms of it replacing the book to tell a story. If history to judge, look at the recent products that are best sellers, such as Amazon’s Kindle or Sony’s eBook Reader, these products demonstrate that people still enjoy the concept of a book that can be read linearly. The next logic step may be to incorporate a type of interactive textuality within the pages of an electronic book; this would help to bridge the gap between a regular novel and selective interactivity.
Focusing on My Boyfriend Came Back from the War:
In Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, the work itself has more context than Hegirascope in that the text and imagery relate to the title of the work. However, after the first viewing of this site it appears to follow the hypertext immersion model, as one can traverse multiple paths where one can easily get lost. Like Hegirascope, some paths lead to empty pages such as the following URLs: http://www.teleportacia.org/war/150.htm and http://www.teleportacia.org/war/152.htm.
Unlike Hegirascope, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War seems to differ in a few ways. First, the work appears to be black and white throughout the entire piece, where Hegirascope was a mixture of colors. Hegirascope is a simplistic online text in terms of what one can do with HTML. With My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, it utilizes the characteristics not found in Hegirascope. First, it used blinking text, where I do not recall seeing in Hegirascope- although I did not traverse every page on Hegirascope. Second, it uses images where Hegirascope only used text. Third is the use of frames in addition to allowing the user to traverse further by clicking in the frames themselves. Hegirascope was a set of standard HTML pages that one could traverse but it did not take advantage of any advanced HTML features.
Hegirascope took a different approach. There appears to be some sort of randomness accompanied with an automatic meta re-direct to the next page. Second, in some cases the text is the same color as the background. Third, the links around the text also seems to change if the same page is re-visited at a later time. My Boyfriend Came Back from the War is more interactive and coherent than Hegirascope in that the user controls his or her path through the work itself and need not worry about the page changing automatically.