Untitled - witz cultural

94HYPERTEXT 3.0 work on the assumption that it must take the form of node and link. A gooddeal oftheoretical and practical attention has appropriately been paid to thedescription, implementation, and categorization of linking. However, as NoahWardop-Fruin has reminded us, Ted Nelson, who did not confine hypertextto the node-and-link form, also proposed stretchtext. According to Nelson'sComputer Lib/Dream Machines (1974),"this form of hypertext is easy to usewithout getting lost . . . Gaps appear between phrases; new words and phrasespop into the gaps, an item at a time . . . The Stretchtext is stored as a textstream with extras, coded to pop in and pop out at the desired altitudes" (315).Compare a reader's experience of stretchtext to that when reading on theWeb. When one follows a link on the World Wide Web, one oftwo things happens:either the present text disappears and is replaced by a new one or thedestination text opens in a new window. (On Windows machines, in whichthe newly opened document obscures the previous one because it appears ontop of it, only an experienced user would know that one can move the mostrecently opened window out of the way. Macintosh machines follow a differentparadigm, emphasizing a multiple-window presentation.) By and large,standard web browsers follow the replacement paradigm whereas otherhypertext environments, such as Intermedia, Storyspace, and Microcosm,emphasize multiple windows. Stretchtext, which takes a different approachto hypertextuality, does what its name suggests and stretches or expands textwhen the reader activates a hot area.For an example, let us look at a single sentence as it appears in a documentbased on passages from this book that I made using Nicholas Friesner'sWeb-based stretchtext. One first encounters the following:Using hypertext, students of critical theory now have a laboratory with which to testits ideas. Most important, perhaps, an experience of reading hypertext or readingwith hypertext greatly clarifies many of the most significant ideas of critical theory. AsJ. David Bolter points out in the course of explaining that hypertextuality embodiespoststructuralist conceptions ofthe open text, "what is unnatural in print becomesnatural in the electronic medium and will soon no longer need saying at all, becauseit can be shown." (www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/stretchtext l gplz.html)Clicking on "critical theory" produces "critical theory. In fact, some of themost exciting student proiects take the form of testing, applyrng, or critiquingspecific points of theory, including notions of the author, text, and multivocality."Nert, clicking on "student proiects" in turn produces "student proiectsin Intermedia, Storyspace, html, and Flash, and published examples ofhypermedia take the form of testing, applyrng, or critiquing specific points of