Chapter 4

In this chapter, Snyder discusses the ways in which the emergence of hypertextual reading and writing alters the role of the author and the reader.

The Author Reconfigured
For Snyder, hypertext intertwines the role of the author and reader: while the author provides the building blocks of a story or argument, the reader has to assemble those building blocks, via choices of links, into a coherent narrative.

She refers to Roland Barthes' essay, The Death of the Author, written before hypertext gained public attention, in which he claims that:

We know that the text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.

Barthes means, simply, that when we write we bring into that writing ideas, memories, fragments of consciousness, etc. drawn from the many texts we have read, and that when we read, we read 'new' text under the influence of the ideas, memories, etc. of all the texts we have read. For most of us, this 'collaging' process as we read and write is barely conscious: Snyder argues that reading electronic text makes visible, through the conscious fragmentation of the text, and the reconstructive device of the link, the process of building a collage that reading and writing really is.

The Author Abandoned?
Snyder further suggests that the author further loses control over the reader via the networks of hyperlinks individual can create across the web, leaping from the work of one writer to the next, and often leaping from the middle of one author's ideas to the middle of another author's ideas. Johndan Johnson-Eilola writes that in hypertext:

control explicitly shifts away from the author, who begins to lose both the need and the opportunity for the great degree of control an author has in print because the hypertext writer's task is not to provide a narrow, fixed product but something closer to a space for conversation with other texts, readers and writers. (Snyder, pp. 66-7)

Johnson-Eilola also argues that the software and hardware themselves push into the old writer/reader relationship, as third parties that add meaning to the experience. He calls electronic reading and writing a 'cyborg activity,' an activity which we can only complete via our interactions with the machine.

Virtual Presences
In electronic, hypertextual reading and writing, the ideas of others can appear much more tangibly than in print: the nature of writing as a collaborative effort with texts and authors which proceed it is much clearer. For example, if I, as an author, refer to a second author's text in a footnote, and that text exists only in print, you as a reader might need to go to a distant library to see it, and encounter the ideas of that second author.

If, however, as an electronic writer, I refer to a second author's text which is available online, for example, I can also link my readers directly to that text. The dependence between my text, and the texts I used to build it, comes alive in the click of a mouse. Thus, argues Snyder, hyperlinking makes other authors and other texts clear virtual 'presences' in the work of any one electronic write, and in the experience of any electronic reader.

The Romantic idea of the writer as tortured individual genius uprooting wholly original language and ideas from his psyche finally dies. (Hurray!)

The Reader Redefined
Snyder outlines the cultural assumptions subsumed in the activity of reading:

• reading is sequential, continuous and generally linear
• readers begin at a clearly marked point defined by the author
• readers work sequentially through paragraphs and pages until the end of the document
• readers predict what is going to happen next in a text (part of the pleasure of reading)
• readers use their experience of reading other texts to predict what will happen next
• readers assume that the text will be printed on paper &, if a book, secured within covers and, most importantly, stay the same

Hypertext challenges these assumptions because:

• readers can choose a number of points at which to begin
• they proceed by following links which do not necessarily (or even probably) unfold in a linear structure
• they exit whenever and wherever they like

Again, though, hypertext only makes visible what readers already do: readers, while following all of the conventions in the first paragraph, also 'put together' a wholly individual experience of a text like a novel or a poem. According to Jay Bolter, in an electronic medium:

...what was only figuratively true in the case of print, becomes literally true...for the reader participates in the making of the text as a sequence of words. Even if the author had written all the words, the reader must call them up and determine the order of presentation by the choices made or the commands issued. There is no single univocal text apart from the reader; the author writes a set of potential texts, from which the reader chooses. (Snyder, p. 71)

Reality Redefined
Hypertext also challenges the view of literature as mimesis, a reproduction of a version of reality. Both the story and the reader's relationship to the story change constantly: no fixed version of an imagined reality emerges. "The desire to lose oneself in the story," according to Snyder, "...encourages passive reading." On the other hand, hypertext forces the reader, "at every screen to reflect on the experience of reading." (p. 72)

Reaching out to other texts, the electronic text invites readers to participate in its own construction. With hypertext, it is the reader who integrates the scattered parts into a whole. The process resembles what the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss calls bricolage, which is the construction of something out of whatever materials are available. (p. 72)

The Hypertext Reader: a Taxonomy
J. M. Slatin, an early hypertext theorist, identifies three types of readers within a hypertextual environment:

• the browser:
  the browser reads for pleasure, is unlikely to cover all material in a hypertext, and requires a 'tracking mechanism' to retrace his/her steps
  
• the user:
  the user searches for specific information & leaves the hypertext when s/he has located it: s/he has a clear purpose and abandons the text when s/he achieves it
• the co-author:
  co-authors become so absorbed in the hypertext that they are, "actively involved in the creation of an evolving hyperdocument." (Snyder, p. 72)

According to Slatin, the states are not mutually exclusive:

...the student moves among three different states: from a user student becomes a browser (and may then become a user once again); ultimately, he or she becomes fully involved as co-author. Thus what looks like a hierarchy of readers collapses." (Snyder, p. 73)

The Challenge
Snyder concludes by looking at the challenge such consciousness of the complex processes and purposes of writing \poses to traditional academic hierarchies. The line, the paragraph, the 'page' is no longer fixed, which in itself challenges the organization of texts into hierarchies of value.

The ability of the reader to become writer through, say, the annotation of an electronic version of a text, enacts the power of the reader/writer to extend the text, however firmly ensconced that text might be in the academic hierarchy, in intellectually original ways.

In the end, any text approached hypertextually evolves: it never remains static, and can always be remade. (pp. 74- 7)