In the blog “What happened to enjoyment?” my fellow class mate mentions that he thinks that these websites have no meaning, and are only meant for enjoyment. Although I would agree that they are placed on the net for our enjoyment I do not agree that they have no meaning at all. I feel that in saying so you are cutting this literature short. Though they are confusing and don’t seem to make sense at first, as you read them and enjoy the creativity that has gone into them all, they begin to make you think in much the same way that some literature does. To pick up a copy of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and say that this is just meant for our enjoyment and is just a strange story, is without a doubt not looking at the text in the way it is intended to be looked at.
what intrigued me the most from the websites for the reading this week was “Bust Down the Doors!”. As with many types of text, when this first plays one might look at it in puzzlement. It is hard to even make out the whole of the text, but as you watch it over and over you begin to piece it together. Once you have done this you then might question why, when this character is pulled out of bed and killed in front of his neighbors, it is “life saving” to remember the dream he was having about the beach. Once the cycle finishes telling you the story with the person this is all happening to, being “you”, it begins to restart; this time it tells us it is happening to “him”, and it continues in this fashion through a few different variations. It then proceeds to mix them all together before restarting its cycle again with “you”. Although I can’t tell you the direct meaning of this, if I were to take it off of a website and place it onto a piece of paper it could easily be argued as poetry, First of all there are so many different emotions expressed in this piece: the hatred of the onlookers, the shame of the person or persons killed, and the release that remembering the dream brings to those killed. Another peculiar thing about this web sight is that all the letters “O” in the text are crossed like a numeric zero.
I understand the argument that people do tend to over analyze many texts, but in my experience that only happens when the meaning is clearly stated and the reader decides to go out on a limb and pull some absurd meaning out of another wise simple story. Some forms of literature are intended to be looked into. Although the author may not have had an intended meaning or moral, they want the reader to be provoked in such a way that it makes him or her think about the text, and learn from it, or at least attempt to make sense of its madness. Even though I am not able to tell you the meaning of this and the other the hyper texts, it is easy to see that one could look into them from many different angles and derive multiple meanings from them that are otherwise not clearly given to the reader.