In my previous post I mentioned that an intimate acquaintance with the creative process behind making [an online hypertext] gives me a totally different awareness of e-textuality and the connectivity of it. Below is a rather lengthy excerpt from the appendix to my final project that elaborates on my loaded use of the term “connectivity.” Mostly I’m posting this because I’m very curious whether any of the rest of you had similar experiences while creating your hypertexts, or if it was just me and I really did go completely insane for a little while there (and that “little while” is misleading, because I’m definitely still feeling the effects…). At any rate, here are some words regarding hypertexts and paranoid schizophrenia:

Something I keep coming back to when I'm thinking about my final project is a point that was made by Brian Kim Stefans in his essay on the electronic book review site we looked at a few weeks ago. His main point, although I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it here, was that "new media writers" are not thinking about how technology and the media they're using can increase the impact of words; language can get reduced to "a useful marker for the passing of time" or "a participant in a recombinant universe jointly occupied by sounds, images, videos and the user’s interactions." Language becomes just another element, equal to other elements like sounds and images. It gets used to make things more concrete or to help the reader/viewer to understand what the digital art is saying. However, electronic components like image, audio file, etc, are not solving problems with the language, not returning the favor so to speak.