There were two points that came up in discussion that I want to take further in my reading response this week. The first was that movies can work in a non-linear fashion, jumping from past to present and into the future. The second was about people wanting to read a text and have the same experience as other people.

The quotation below from George Landow’s essay Hypertext and Critical Theory is important in unifying both Landow and Aarseth’s ideas of the reader being in the role of deciding how to organize his or her own experience of reading a text.
“All hypertext systems permit the individual reader to choose his or her own center of investigation and experience. What this principle means in practice is that the reader is not locked into any kind of particular organization or hierarchy” (RDC, 108).

While reading George Landow’s “Hypertext and Critical Theory”, I couldn’t help thinking about my research experience I had last semester while writing the final paper for my freshman seminar. Before starting our research, we dedicated one class period to speaking to a librarian on how to utilize the libraries many resources. When the time came to start researching my paper I spent hours scouring the libraries resources for academic journal articles that pertained to my subject but I was having very little luck.

What I found really interesting about George Landow’s “Hypertext and Critical Theory” article was the idea that hypertext “is composed of bodies of linked texts that have no primary axis of organization” (105). This means that the reader has the ability to choose the center of interest. By choosing which links to click, readers direct the movement of their search through the linked documents. With such a variety of information available on the Internet, we can sort through it using hypertext, continually shifting the document of interest to suit our need.

The idea of a nonlinear text is something that intrigues me. I can see how the hypertext format can be adapted to create a text that has no beginning, no ending, or no center, but why?