Portals Through Time

I offer you these three main points from the readings this week:

• “the very interconnected nature of texts holds them apart.” (Johnson-Eilola, 200) 

• “The reader no longer just reads what is offered to him or her, but is actively involved in creating the text. In the context of hypertext theory, this for a long time just meant: as the reader selects his or her reading path within the complex hypertext structure, he or she develops and individual way of reception. […] Strongly interlaced hypertext systems, therefore, create a labyrinth with innumerable possibilities for reception.” (Kohl et al, 172)

• “Texts – as they develop in Wikis – stand in an historical continuum.” (Kohl et al, 178)

I felt that the two texts read very well with each other, especially when you think of Wikipedia in terms of a database, and each webpage or hyperlink being one datum in the whole of the database. Wikipedia works simultaneously as a continuous hypertext as well as a database filled with different links that may not correspond to each other but are inevitably paired just by being in the database. Therefore, a relationship between two points is created but is ultimately harmed by the fact that they may have nothing to do with each other, that they do not necessarily contribute to the reader’s understanding of a particular topic. They can either strengthen each other or tear each other apart. 

Another example which I think demonstrates the historical nature of hypertexts/databases is the Internet Archive. The coolest thing about the Internet Archive is that it not only saves multimedia and physical texts, but it has a tool which allows you to look up a given website, say Google, and see how that website has changed over time. For instance, using the WayBackMachine, you can type in a URL and it will give you a timeline and a calendar, which you can select a specific date, say February 24, 2001, and it will show you how that page looked and illustrate the features it has. This allows us to think of websites themselves as datum in the Internet database, rather that only allowing for certain types of collaborative writing (such as Wiki pages) to be part of this historical continuum. 

I think we can also extend the idea of the historical continuum to the progress through a certain website for the reader, although in a different kind of sense. Instead of seeing changes within a specific page, we track the historical progress or the movement through time and knowledge that a reader goes through, and thus creates a meaning dependent on a specific continuum which they themselves chose. By jumping to specific web pages or through specific hyperlinks, they move through these texts creating meanings that don’t necessarily correspond with intention. Then – when we think of the text as its own object outside of reader or author (Kohl et al, 174), we can see that there are more links between web pages than we originally thought. Everything seems to have access to everything else (do you buy that?).