Untitled - witz cultural

327THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXT"First by permitting various paths through a group of documents (one can nolonger write 'one document or text'), it makes readers, rather than writers,control the materials they read and the order in which they read them. Second,true hypertext, such as the Intermedia system developed at Brown University, permits readers to become authors by adding electronic links betweenmaterials created by others and also by creating materials themselves."Aarseth comments: "Landow's project at Brown is one of institutional reform,and even if he bestows the role of reformer on the technology-in this case,h)?erte)ct-it really belongs to him" (171). I certainly agree that my teachingwith hypermedia from Intermedia to the present involves institutional aswell as pedagogical reform, but one hardly needs Aarseth to point that out,since the eighty-page chapter in which the quotation appears continuallyemphasizes that to activate the educational potential of hypertext, instructorsmust rethink and reconfigure the subjects, procedures, assignments,and evaluation methods they use. Here as throughout much of his critiqueof statements about the potentially positive nature or effects of hypertext,Aarseth falsely claims that someone else has identified hypertext as the soleand sufficient cause of something when they have in fact actually argued thatit provides an enabling, though not by itself a sufficient, condition.One of the most disturbing aspects of Aarseth's critique involves his lackof any comment on the following sentence: "Second, true hypertext, suchas the Intermedia system developed at Brown Universiry permits readers tobecome authors by adding electronic links between materials created by othersand also by creating materials themselves." I find such omissions very oddsince I am claiming that read-write hypertefi systems like Intermedia firlfillhis own definition of an author. As he points out, "the politics of the authorreaderrelationship, ultimately, is not a choice between various pairs of mediaor forms of textuality, but instead is whether the user has the ability to transformthe text into something that the instigator of the text could not foreseeor plan for" (16a). After all his denials that choosing links in any way affectsthe relation between author and reader, he doesn't even acknowledge theclaims of a hypermedia system in which readers clearly can act as authors.Aarseth also claims that "it seems somewhat self-contradictory to claim,as Landow does, that hlpertext blurs the distinction between reader andauthor while at the same time permitting the former to become the latter"(173). His difficulties in comprehending my ideas of hypertext readers herecome from his habit of thinking in terms of binary oppositions. In fact, Iargue that the reader who chooses among links or takes advantage of Storyspacetspatial-hypertext capabilities shares some of the power of the author.