As apposed to my colleagues, I found myself to truly enjoy this article. I know people are going to think I’m a total bitch for not arguing her points or her writing style but I really did like it. Yes I agree, this writing style is extremely disorienting and schizophrenic however, I believe Shelley Jackson wrote the article this way to emulate how hypertext is used on the web.
“In hypertext, you can’t find out what’s important so you have to pay attention to everything, which is exhausting like being in a foreign country; you are not native.” Would this sentence still make sense if you substituted the words “this article” in place of the word “hypertext”. In my opinion you definitely could. Which I think is why this article is so successful for me.
The most influential line of this article for me, was in the section titled Reality Fiction. In this section Jackson ponders how hypertext allows us to make fiction a reality. An incredibly difficult idea to conjure up but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. The example she uses might not be the best one so I’ve come up with a different example and I’m taking it from one of the examples that Jane McGonigal uses in her book Reality is Broken. McGonigal tells us the story of how she co-created the online network game for the Olympics. A totally non-fictional real event. By using the web she was able to get inside reality using fiction and the participators of the game banded together to create something “real that we don’t already know, something unfamiliar, not part of the family, a changeling.” (Jackson 247)
My final thoughts on this article remain pondering what Jackson was trying to get at in the section titled Collage. As I read some of my peers’ responses who took shots at Jackson’s writing style or approach to this article, I couldn’t help but think back to this section of the book. Jackson perfectly describes how each one of us wrote our blogs on this topic. Every person attempted to “set up rendezvous between words never before seen in company, we provide deliciously private places for them to couple.” I cannot express how incredibly intuitive I find the way she describes how people are using the English language by introducing the collage as a metaphor for how people write. Aren’t these blog posts a perfect example of how our work is just an arrangement of all the stuff that we borrow, the buttons and coins, springs and screws of language, the frames and machinery of culture? (Jackson 251)
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