Untitled - witz cultural

't45RECONFIGURINGWRITINGThree points here demand notice. First, the concept of disorientation relatesclosely to the tendency to use spatial, geographical, and travel metaphorsto describe the way users experience hypertext. Such uses are obviouslyappropriate to dictionary definitions of disorient. Neither The Ameican HeritageDiaionary nor Webster's Collegiate DicNionary defines disorientation, butaccording to The Ameican Heitage Dictionory,Io disorient is "to cause to loseone's sense of direction or location, as by removing from a familiar environment,"and Webster's offers three definitions of d.isoient: (1)"to cause to loseone's bearings: displace from normal position or relationship"; (2) "to causeto lose the sense of time, place, or identity"; and (3) "to confuse."In general, authors writing about hypertext seem to mean confuse andspecifically losebeoingswhen they use the term, and this usage derives fromcommonplace application of spatial metaphors to describe the reader's behaviorin a hypertext environment. Thus, in "The Art of Navigating through Hypertext,"]akob Nielsen points out in the usual formulation that "one of themajor usability problems with hypertext is the user's risk of disorientationwhile navigating the information space. For example, our studies showedthat 56 percent of the readers of a document written in one of the most popularcommercial hypertext systems agreed fully or parnally with the statemenlI wos often confused about where I was" (298). Nielsen believes that "truehypertext should also make usersfeel that they can move freely through theinformation according to their own needs" (298).Second, as Conklin and others wdting in this field state the problem ofdisorientation, it obviously concerns the design of the information technologyalone. In other words, the related concepts ofdisorientation and confusionappear, in their terms, to have nothing to do with the materials, the content,on the hlpertext system. Nonetheless, we all know that readers oftenexperience confusion and disorientation simply because they fail to grasp thelogic or even meaning of a particular argument. Even if the works of Kant,Einstein, and Heidegger were to appear on the finest hypertext and informationretrieval system in the world, they would still disorient many readers.Although Conklin and other students of hypertext have not naively or incompletelydefined what they mean by disorientation, their restriction of thisterm to system-generatedisorientation in practice does not take into accounta large portion of the actual reading experience-and its implications forhypertext authors. The issue has a bearing on a third point about the notionof disorientation.Third, disorientation, as these comments make clear, is conceived bythese authors as crippling and disenabling, as something, in other words,