Untitled - witz cultural

240HYPERTEXT 3.0 things, a 'mark left on the skin or other tissue after a wound, burn, ulcer, pushrle,lesion, etc. has healed,' a 'marring or disfiguring mark on anything,' and'the lasting mental or emotional effects of suffering or anguish."' The firstmeaning, Pack explains, defines the scar "as a joining, that is, a visual signalthat two pieces of skin that were not contiguous at one time now are. In thissense, a scar is the biological version of the seam, where Mother Nature (or,in *re case of Frankenstein and Patchwork Girl, a human creator) sews fleshtogether in the same way a seamstress stitches together a quilt or the creatorof a hypertext links terts together."According to Pa&, the next definition "presents the scar as a mark of disfigurement.Scars are ugly (in modern Western society, at least). They're jarringbreaks in the otherwise even epidermis," and links similarly "disrupt,scar, an otherwise linear texti' (Pack wrote his critique in HTML to be readwith a World lTide Web yiewer, and he thus added that the appearance of theIink "is even similar; most graphical browsers will display a 'scar'beneath thelinks on this page, though a user can play the role of cosmetic surgeon andopt to conceal this disfigurement of the text if they so choose." )The last definitiongives the scar a more abstract meaning; it is now a sign of trauma. In order for a scarto exist, the flesh must have been torn. The formation of a scar is a kludge: its appearanceis the result ofhaphazard regeneration rather than orderly growth. The linkis similarly a textual trauma; the transitions between sentences and paragraphs giveway to (presumably) intuitive leaps between texts and ideas. The replacement (asopposed to the appending) of text caused by following an HTML link is disorientingto saythe least; even the sudden appearance ofanotherwindow (in an environmentsuch as Storyspace) interferes with the reader's practice down-and-to-the-rightmovement across a "page" oftext.Pack entitled his subweb, "Frankenfiction," and his examination of scars,links, and seams in Potchwork Girlemphasizes the way fackson uses them tocreate a tefiual "monster."Like Donna f . Haraway, Jackson rejoices in the cultural value of monsters.Traveling within |ackson's multisequential narrative, we first wander alongmany paths, finding ourselves in the graveyard, in Mary Shelley's 1'ournal, inscholarly texts, and in the life histories of the beings-largely women butalso an occasional man and a cow-who provided the monster's parts. As weread, we increasingly come to realize an assemblage of points, one of themost insistent of which appears in the way we use our information technol-