Ok, so hypertext…
According to Shelley Jackson, “Hypertext is schizophrenic… the thing is not more present than what the thing reminds you of; in this way you can slip out of one text and into a footnoted text and find yourself reading another text entirely, a text to which your original text is a footnote”.
Ironically, this is exactly what I ended up doing while reading “Stitch Bitch”. I found myself slipping out of the text of the page. A word I read would trigger a thought about something entirely different, and I would find myself taking breaks…to eat dinner, check Facebook, reply to e-mails, read other books for school…etc. Shelley was right, the “thing” (in this case “Stitch Bitch”) was definitely not more present than the things it reminded me of, because I got up from Shelley’s reading to do them. Probably without intending to do so, her text became it’s own hypertext link to other tasks in my life.
Ok, so I’m not a fan of her writing style. I thought the text was so dense and convoluted with different thoughts, going off in different tangents, that it was difficult at times to grasp the ideas she was trying to convey. But at other times, I really connected with some of the ideas that she brought forth.
Shelley writes about the idea that traditional books are linear and have a clear ending point, but that hypertext is unique because the mind does not have to stop reading or looking or searching as long as there are “slightly more indicators than the mind can make sense of”. I find this idea kind of fascinating…the fact that there is no stopping point to the information you can take in (especially when it comes to websites), the stopping point is when YOU as the reader or user interacting with the information chooses to stop. When it comes to designing websites based on user needs, this is a pretty important piece of information for the designer to consider. Is the goal of the website to get the user to stay as long as possible? To learn about something specific? To navigate through a certain number of pages? Whatever the purpose, the designer doesn’t really have control over what the end user is going to do with the information presented. However, he/she can try and design it in a way to promote the end goal by taking the choice of the user to just stop interacting at any point into consideration.