Hypertext and the Role of the Reader and Writer

Hypertext gives "permission" to readers to insert themselves into the meaning

construction process and "write" a text in a way that is often different from what
the author foresaw. Hypertext makes us conscious of the blurring of the
reader/author role. Book technology seems to fix our notion of authorship and
hypertext challenges us to rethink that role and the role of the reader.
Birkerts
Sven Birkerts (1994)believes that electronic text, and hypertext in particular, is
killing the author. In a traditional reading situation, Birkerts places the writer,
"the flesh and blood individual" at one end of a continuum. At the other is "the
flesh-and-blood reader" (96). He places between these two, "words on a page
[that'] don't change" (96) Birkerts is uncomfortable with the disorientation he
experiences when he reads hypertext. And he worries that hypertext will destroy
literature and its role in our culture. He believes that hypertext and other
electronic texts will weaken the quality of writing and displace order for chaos.
CREE QUE DEBE ESTAR EL LECTOR A UN LADO Y EL AUTOR AL OTRO
Y CREE QUE EL AUTOR MORIRA EN EL CAOS DEL HIPTERXTO AL
INTENTA ESCRIBIR AMBOS.
Snyder Ilana Snyder believes that hypertext is changing our notions of
authorship. She notes that the absence of textual autonomy and centeredness
disperses the author. But Snyder points out that the amount of control
experienced by a reader is largely dependent on hardware and software. In
Storyspace, for example, a hypertext writing program published by Eastgate
Systems, links can be hidden in the text and the reader must either search for the
links by randomly clicking on words that might be a link, or by executing a key
stroke that highlights where the links are in the lexia. She points out that
computers shape the way we think, encouraging some kinds of thinking and
discouraging others. She uses the example of a blackboard where text is created
with the assumption that it will be erased. Paper and pen writing encourages
writers to attend to grammar and spelling and to use a more controlled type of
thinking. Computers invite writers to think non-linearly and cooperatively. She
points out that "we organize our writing space in the way we organize our

thoughts, and in the way in which we think the world itself must be organized
(69).
Landow
Landow writes that hypertext blurs the boundaries between reader and writer and
claims that, because of the nature of hypertext, the fact that the reader has to
make choices and acts upon those choices by clicking on a word or image, the
reader becomes "active." Perhaps it is important to point out here that although I
consider Landow one of the key figures in hypertext theory, I have difficulty with
his use of the word "active" here. All reading, all meaning construction is active.
Reading is not a passive activity.
Perhaps a better word to explain the role of the reader in this re-centerable system
is the word "deliberate." Hypertext reading requires the reader to make deliberate
decisions about which path to take within a hypertext web. And as I write this, I
know that there are instances when readers of more traditional texts like
dictionaries and encyclopedias, not to mention magazines, make deliberate
choices regarding where and what they will read. But for the time being, until I
can come up with a better word, I will describe the hypertext reader as deliberate,
as one who deliberately reads a text according to his or her own interests or
organizing principles.
Landow frequently mentions narratologist Gerard Genette, and Genette's ideas
are particularly relevant to a discussion of the reader/writer roles. Landow, citing
Genette, maintains that hypertext is a means of escaping what Genette refers to as
the idolatry or idealization of the author. Hypertext, because of its openness, its
fuzzy borders that are so easily permeated, makes the author's role as diffused as
the boundaries of the text itself. Landow also talks about Walter Ong's theory
regarding the relationship between computer technology and orality. Ong argues
that computers have brought with them a "second orality" that is very similar to
the participatory sense of community and a focus on the present moment in oral
cultures. And though Ong seems to go astray when he talks about computers and
sequential processing, he (and Landow) make the interesting point that books and
their authors cannot be challenged in any immediate sense.

Hypertext readers, however, can challenge a text immediately, or as immediately

as the reader can write a response and link that response to the author's text. This
placement of text within a larger domain of text places the reader and the writer
in a kind of dialogue that cannot happen as easily in the world of paper and ink.
Murray
Murray poses an interesting argument that in electronic text, which includes other
media besides hypertext, the author still exists but as a choreographer. The reader
is not the author of the text but can experience many of the "exciting aspects of
artistic creation-the thrill of exerting power over enticing and plastic materials"
(153). Murray makes an intriguing point. The reader of electronic text, and
especially hypertext, is not experiencing authorship. The reader is experiencing
agency. Murray defines agency as the ability to take meaningful actions and to
see the results of those actions (126). Murray points out that the kind of agency
that takes place in the reading of hypertext fiction, particularly, is rather rare in
more traditional narrative forms. The difference may be that by entering a
computer environment, the reader alters the environment of the text through his
or her participation.
If hypertext is challenging the role of author and reader, it is not the first textual
innovation to do so. Ilana Snyder (1996) reminds us that in manuscript days
scribes often altered the work they were copying. This blurred, even then, the
boundaries between author and reader. Snyder adds that the tradition of print
literacy privileges the author. Nothing, supposedly, can be changed about a text
once the author (along with the publisher and editor) have finished with the text.
French literary critic Roland Barthes, in his interesting essay "The Death of the
Author," (1993) points out that a piece of text is "not a line of words releasing a
single 'theological' meaning (the message of the Author-God), but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, non of them original, blend and
clash" (116).
Most hypertext theorists would agree. Snyder also points out that oral texts had
many of the features that theorists claim are inherent in hypertexts. Oral texts
could be revised at will by the speaker who altered stories depending on the
prompts from an audience. But book technology provided a new framing device
for narrative and other forms. Murray (1997) points out that with electronic text

the "author" is procedural, like a choreographer "who supplies the rhythms, the
context, and the set of steps that will be performed" (153). The reader, or as she
calls him or her, the "interactor", is a "navigator, protagonist, explorer, or builder,
[who] makes use of [a] repertoire of possible steps and rhythms to improvise a
particular dance among the many, many possible dances the author has enabled.
We could perhaps say that the interactor is the author of a particular performance
within an electronic story system, or the architect of a particular part of the
virtual world, but we must distinguish this derivative authorship from the original
authorship of the system itself" (153)
In this sense, Murray is reminding us that each time a reader enters a hypertext
web, the reader creates a "new" text, written by the choices he or she makes as
she travels through the docuverse. And Landow (1992, 1997) consistently
reminds us that the text an interactor reads is not necessarily the text an author
planned. All this seems much like the ancient storyteller who changes the text to
fit the wishes of each audience. The audience and the storyteller (author)
collaborate to create the narrative.
Collaboration is a key element in hypertext reading and writing. In a sense both
the reader and the writer collaborate with the computer. But because the reader is
physically required to execute some sort of command and to make a choice as to
which command, the reader collaborates with the author. We can put this in
Murray's terms and say that the reader or dance is collaborating with the
choreographer or writer so that some version, perhaps a new one, of the author's
plan flashes onto the screen. But Landow adds that a hypertext reader/writer
"almost inevitably works collaboratively whenever creating documents in a
multi-author hypertext system" (2.0, 110)
Landow (1997) reminds us that print technology has imposed a more "passive"
role on readers.
Hypertext, however, allows the reader to insert himself or herself, either through
copying and pasting words onto a new "page" or lexia, and adding to the text, or
linking a reader's lexia to the author's. This of course turns the reader into an
author, and has the potential to turn the author into a reader. Of course,
theoretically this has always been true. Someone can alter a text by typesetting a

new text, and a reader may write a critique and publish it in a book, but the
process is cumbersome and even costly and delayed.
But Landow points out that hypertext blurs the boundaries between reader and
author in much the way Barthes suggests text should. Landow goes one step
further and posits that the distinction between readerly and writerly text is
essentially the distinction between electronic or hypertext technology and print
technology. Barthes writes: "the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is
to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Our
literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution
maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its
customer, between its author and its reader" (S/Z 4).
Certainly a hypertext reader is more than just a consumer of the text. The
hypertext reader seems more akin to the ancient audience of the storyteller--a
collaborator. The hypertext reader is a deliberate force within the text itself, not
divorced from the text, but a partner with both the author and the text.
Murray believes that hypertext does not diminish the author's agency, but it may
make the reader more conscious of his or her agency within the narrative or other
discursive form. Murray points out that there is a distinction between authorship
and agency. Murray emphasizes that readers ...can only act within the
possibilities that have been established by the writing and the programming.
Louise Rosenblatt would disagree with Birkerts' notion of authorial power. The
reader brings a text to life. In order to bring that text to life the reader must
transact with the text, the reader must write the text for herself or himself. And in
the reader's mind the text sifts through all of the reader's previous experiences as
the reader goes through the meaning-making process. In this sense the reader is
always central to the text.
Davida Charney is perhaps the most recognized of the cognitivists who write
about hypertext. She scoffs at what she calls the Romantics (meaning Landow,
Bolter, etc.) who approach hypertext as a more "Coleridgean" concept of an
infinitely evolving text that liberates readers and writers from textual boundaries.
Charney does not believe that readers necessarily know best which information is
important, and so it should be the role of the author to establish that for them

(241) To be fair, Charney admits that her goal is "not to accept or dismiss
hypertext processes or hypertext in principle, but rather to point to specific
aspects of reading and writing processes that hypertext designers must consider if
they are to serve readers and writers effectively" (241).
Charney assumes that readers conduct themselves through a sequential process,
one that has been designated by the author whose sole purpose is to see that the
reader conducts himself or herself through a progression of ideas the author has
perhaps laboriously laid out.
But the writer of a hypertext goes into the task knowing the reader will not
progress through the text in any given sequence or at least has the option if taking
multiple possible paths if there is a default sequence. The writer's role, as Murray
says, is to choreograph the text, to set it up so that the reader can dance among
the lexias as he or she sees fit. It may be that a hypertext writer will have to
envision different readers who have different purposes.
Slatin (1992) actually identifies three different types of hypertext readers: the
browser, the user, and the co-author (158). The browser reads for no particular
purpose other than to find something interesting with which to engage. The user
is looking for specific information and uses the hypertext to find that
information. The co-author collaborates deliberately with the hypertext, inserting
his or her own lexias in response, or incorporating existing lexias into a new
hypertext web or docuverse. It is impossible, actually, to predetermine whether a
hypertext will serve the needs of the browser, the user, or the co-author, so a
writer cannot always create a hypertext web with any particular audience in
mind.