Untitled - witz cultural

Reconfiguring WritingThe Problematic Conceptof DisorientationSince writing hypermedia successfully involves finding waysto prevent readers from becoming confused and discouragedwhen they encounter text in e-space, let us examine thisnotion of disorientation before considering some of the methodsused to prevent it. Crucial as disorientation might seem to discussions ofhypertext authoring, this term remains unexamined and inadequately defined.Such a claim might appear particularly odd because writers on the subjectsince feffConklin have apparently provided fairly precise statements ofwhat they mean by what Conklin himself term ed the d.isonentation problern.According to his initial statement of the issue, disorientation seems to inherein the medium itself; "Along with the power of being able to organize informationmuchmore complexlycomes the problem ofhavingtoknow (1) whereyou are in the network and (2) how to get to some other place that you know(orthink) exists inthe network. I callthis the disoientationproblem. Of course,one has a disorientation in traditional linear text documents, but in a lineartext the reader has only two options: He can search for the desired text earlierin the text or later in the tert" (38). Kenneth Utting and Nicole Yankelovich,who similarly point out that "hypermedia . . . has the potential to dramaticallyconfuse and confound readers, writers, teachers, and learners," quote Conklin'sdefinition of disorientation as "the tendency to lose one's sense of locationand direction in a nonlinear document" (58), and in their example ofthree aspects of disorientation, they mention "confusion about where to goor, having decided on a destination, how to get there," and also disorientationin the sense of not knowing "the boundaries of the information space" (61)one is exploring.