As a connoisseur of good writing (if I may), I agree with Shelley Jackson’s statements regarding writing in the “Write Mutt” section of her essay, “Stitch Bitch.” I love writers with long, discursive sentences (David Foster Wallace essays, his buddy Jonathan Franzen). With print, you can go back – flip through the pages, compare or make notes. It’s actually a lot easier to do than reading online (although DFW’s essays are hypertext in their own right, and would be interesting translated online). Hypertext – links – take you everywhere and before you know it, you’re lost down a rabbit hole.
It’s interesting that we’re reading “Stitch Bitch” in Visual Aesthetics, but I see how her argument applies to the program as a whole. On the surface, it’s about writing – breaking free of boundaries, and she has numerous fun sentences, lots to quote from. But it’s also about art, and I can see how we’re supposed to take this as the old Apple tagline to “Think Different.” Hypertext is a way to connect things, a constellation, a collage, as Jackson put it; a more structured form of thought, not just stream-of-consciousness, but in an inventive way.
Is hypertext native to the Internet? Early websites weren’t very interactive, but that was a combination of available tools, structured thinking, and infrastructure. But the Internet certainly makes it easier for hypertext to become real, although it has certainly existed before (again, I’m going to reference David Foster Wallace as an example). Jackson is reminding us that we need to not let our previous limitations of whatever form or background limit us now, since the Internet has opened up all these possibilities. Now, maybe some of us (if not all of us) are already aware of this – but I bet there are even more possibilities than we are aware. “The boundaries between genres and disciplines keep people dumb and inflexible and make them careerists of the imagination,” she writes, and this form of thinking – of constraining to what’s been done before – is endemic in academia, industry, even music, and breaking boundaries is something that should be considered. Not just to do so for the purpose of doing so – Jackson does this in her argument to illustrate her thinking – but so we can fully express ourselves.
Jackson gives no definition or examples of hypertext. I know this is a done purposefully – we’re supposed to think of it as this wild, freewheelin’ way of dealing with emotion and content, a world of possibilities. Jackson is trying to get her readers to realize what’s out there, to provoke and stimulate – simulating hypertext. However, she hints that hypertext is beyond the Internet, and that definition isn’t very well-known outside. A hypertext novel? Not something most people would be able to identify or define. I think of transmedia storytelling as another version of hypertext, but again, not a term that is well known (I actually first heard of transmedia storytelling from looking at a project done by an alum of this program).
This goes back to Jackson’s statement that “disorderly texts” – which can be hypertext – can be very confusing and problematic, and “inspires the same kind of distaste that bad grooming does…hard to read [and] …anti-social. Writing, like art, can be experimental, complex, frustrating and obtuse, or clear, concise, beautiful, ugly, whatever. Basically, it’s what you want it to be, and don’t hold back. Something to keep in mind while we go through this program, and in life. The question is, how do you do that? How do you break bad habits, change your thinking? These are questions I am constantly struggling with.
“… The Internet seems to be making possible a gorgeous excess of personal syntactical or neural maps, like travel brochures for the brain,” she writes, and I imagine these beautiful infographics: “Art forms take shape around our ability to perceive beauty, but our ability to perceive beauty also takes shape around what forms become possible. Hypertext is making possible a new kind of beauty, and creating the senses to perceive it with.”
That is how we should think about design.