Birkerts is very critical of electronic reading as he describes the multiple problems (in his eyes) with hypertext. It’s messy, nonlinear, and overall makes reading electronic texts very hard to do. We, as a class had a very close interaction with these hypertexts with the reading of “Luminous Airplanes.” Most of the class could agree how confusing and difficult it was to get any useful information out of the hypertexts because of how complex the text was. On the other side, few people may have believed that the hypertext made the text much more interesting and fun to read. Sort of like trying to complete puzzle or build something from the ground up. Personally, I agree with the first claim that this kind of reading it is confusing because it constantly broke my train of thought to click and read another hyperlink.
I began reading the electronic text “Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales,” by Mary Pinto and Edward Falco. It is essentially a series of landscape type pictures created by the pouring of different chemicals on paper, creating a vast variety of colors. Overtop of the images are poems or stories about the landscape. It was very confusing at first because it is a very nontraditional “book,” if it can even be called a book at all. There are different points on the screen that you can click to bring up new “pages” of landscape and poem/story. It does not tell you where to click, and you just have to figure it out. This took me a while to figure out as I was very confused at first, but I eventually figured it out. What upset me was as soon as you clicked, a new image would pop up, and the text would come in for you to read; The catch was that as soon as you began reading, the text would slowly fade away and disappear so you could not finish the text! It was very frustrating as you had to read the text fast in order to finish the poem in time. Even if you finish the poem, there is no where near enough time to finish reading the clump of text at the bottom. I found myself clicking the same spot multiple times to keep bringing up the text to even try and read it. It was very frustrating. Birkerts would be very critical of this text because of how difficult and confusing it was to read. I did not get much out of the text because I had to constantly stop reading in order to read further. During this time I had lost my train of thought about the particular poem and would essentially have to start over again.
I also did a quick interaction with “Deviant,” by Donna Leishman. This text was more of a video game and very interactive with there reader. there was a lot of figuring out to tell the story by clicking in peculiar parts of the image. I did not spend enough time with the text figure out the overall story, but with enough time, I think that I could. I believe that Murray would enjoy this text because of the video game-like interaction that it has with the reader. This is different than “Luminous Airplanes,” because it is not text, but image. This kind of hypertext is much more interactive and interesting than that of which we have seen in the past.
Chris's Blog 