Linearity or lack thereof

Waaaaay back in the beginning of the semester, I posted something about how blogging wasn’t for perfectionists, because it thrives on a kind of spontaneity that is in tension with the planning and revision that perfectionists need.

Reading (browsing? surfing? floating in?) GAM3R 7H30RY, I felt a similar tension—between linear and nonlinear modes of reading. In GAM3R 7H30RY, you read the text itself, on those digital index card-looking things, and then you have a choice about whether or not to read the comments. Now, it seems that the comments are often the most interesting part of the text, so you really shouldn’t skip them. On the other hand, the importance of the comments doesn’t seem to lessen the value of Wark’s text, because without the original text, the comments wouldn’t exist. So although there certainly is some sensation of the linear, of accomplishing something, of moving progressively forward as you advance from card to card, this sensation is undercut by the “digression” (into the most important part of the text) that is required when we choose to read the comments.

Now that I think about it, this feeling strikes me as even more similar to the frustration many of us felt as we read our first hypertexts— the feeling that we weren’t moving forward in the text, or that we couldn’t control how we moved from lexia to lexia—than to the process of blogging.