Stitch Bitch was fun for me. I do a pretty good job of not getting confused by things I read, mostly because I never take them that seriously. But as someone who has spent a good deal of time writing Hypertext (though I’m still not 100% sure she’s talking about HTML) I agree that linear writing has no place online.
There’s still order, sure, just not top to bottom, left to right. When I’m writing ‘code’ for a web site, I can write here a little and there a little, and every piece can be available as they’re uploaded onto the Internet.
I think that there’s still some way for this to go before it’s truly applicable to all media, but online, so long as the code’s complete, it’s free to change and evolve and start and stop as it pleases. Hypertext has the same power, frankly, as the reader.
Reading online is a lot like reading Stitch Bitch. My classmates all say things like “this chick’s got ADD” or “She must be on drugs”, but they’d all read like that if it were online. When we read pages online, we don’t read them like a book, we bounce around, we open up links, we read some of that page, we go back to the page we were reading. Then we open up Facebook and forget what we were even doing.
As it is written in the book, Stitch Bitch seems confusing. But I think the author was trying to illustrate that we no longer ingest media like we used to. Instead, we’re the ones on drugs. We’re the ones with ADD. We’re the ones that can’t start reading from the top of a webpage without having to click on links and images and videos. We’re the patchwork girl.