Untitled - witz cultural

93RECONFIGURINCTHE TEXTreturn to find the text where one left it, unchanged. The characteristic fixityof writing, therefore, endows the reader with the ability to process it asynchronously-thatis, at the convenience of the reader.n Consider the differenceof such fixed text from video and animated text: if one leaves the televisionset to answer the phone or welcome a guest, the program has moved onand one cannot retrieve it, unless, that is, one has a digital or analogue copyofit and can replay it. The very great difference in degree ofaudience controlbetween video as seen on broadcastelevision and video viewed from storagemedia, such as videotape, DVD, or TiVo, suggests that they are experiencedas different media. Still, since video, like cinema, is a temporal form-a technologythat presents its information in necessary sequence-one generallyhas to follow long patches of the story or progtam in its original sequenceto find one's place in an interrupted narrative. Animated text, in contrast,entirely conlrols the reader's access to information at the speed and at the timethe author wishes. One could, it is true, replay the entire animated text, butthe nature of the medium demands that the minimum chunk that can be examinedtakes the form of the entire sequence.Another form of moving text appears in the timed links of Stuart Moulthrop'sHegirascope,links that dramatically affect the reader's relation to text.The reading experience produced by these timed links contrasts sharply withthat possible with wdting, print, and most hypertext. Since the text disappearsat timed intervals outside the reader's control, the characteristic fixity of writingdisappears as the document being read is replaced by another. Some of the replacementshappen so quickly that this text enforces rapid reading, preventingany close reading, much less leisurely contemplation of it. Michael foyce famouslyasserted that "hypertext is the revenge of text upon television" (OfTwoMinds,47, tll), by which I take him to mean that hypertext demands activereaders in contrast to television's relatively passive audience. These examples ofanimated (or disappearing) text in contrast appear to be extensions of televisionand film to encompass and dominate text, or in Joyce's terms, the revenge oftelevision (broadcast media) on hypertext. This is not necessarily a bad thing,any more than cinema is worse than print narrative. Animated text, like cinemaand video, exists as an art form with its own criteria. It's just not hypertext.StretchtextNot all animated alphanumeric text, it turns out, is nonhypertextual.In fact, Ted Nelson's stretchtext, which he advances asa complement to the by-now standard node-andJink form,produces a truly reader-activated form.1o Except for researchers working withspatial hypertext, most students of hypermedia, like all users of the Web,