For my Writing for Electronic Communities , the class was directed to read a non-liner hypertext material to explore hyper text’s that deviate from ‘traditional’ forms of literature. The circular hypertext that really tied me up in a obsessive knot was The Jew’s Daughter, both frustrating and scarily addictive.
I started off reading this text with the usual confidence and bravado of a writer who thinks she knows it all. I could take what was coming, I had read War and Peace, and other such strenuous literary examples, what could this text do to me other than bore me?
I soon ate my words.
Once a page of The Jew’s Daughter appeared before me, my eyes zoomed in on the one blue link that existed, a highlighted word that begged to be pressed from the moment I spied it. I tried to read, tried to make logical sense of the progression of the story, but it didn’t mean anything. Instead of coming to grips with the text’s meaning, as one does with a regular book, I became more in touch with the psychological pull of links.
By the end of the third page I spent more time trying to NOT press the blue link than concentrating on reading. What was the impulse that drove me? My eyes would march like soldiers down a sentence, only to return to the blue. I managed to read one more page but felt the impulse to press blue eat at me. The insane need tickled my brain. Press it. Press it. Do it. You know you want to. You’re not concentrating on what you’re reading anyways. The only gratifying action is to press, press, press.
Gradually my eyes would stray again and again to that blue word. It waited for me, it called me. The normal black type had little meaning and I eventually I broke down and my mouse hovered over and over and over and over the bluelink. I was like an individual suffering from OCD, blue, blue, blue. Switching the paragraphs, the structure of the text, I didn’t care, I just wanted to see what the next blue word would be. The frustration mounted, because I chased these words around and around in a circle, but never got to click. A link comes with a click, I felt cheated and chased a click that, like comprehension, would never come. I started just listing the blue words. The rest of the text was no good, the blue meant everything.
But then the next page held nothing. No word was high lighted blue. For a moment I panicked. I knew the pattern, the visual guide promised me a blue word, but no word was blue. Bereft I searched the text, was FORCED to read it. Finally, there at the bottom of the page, not a word but a single parenthesis was blue. I was flooded with a blue relief, my fixation gratified once more. But why highlight grammar and not a word? The words had meaning, didn’t they? So then, does grammar have just as much meaning? Is the placement of grammar as imperative to meaning as words? Yes, it is. Thanks for the lesson Judd Morrissey, but not for the obsession.
Why are links blue? Blue is supposed to calm people. It doesn’t calm me. Blue is supposed to repress hunger. It makes me hungry to know what is behind the link. Some people sing the Blues and some people swear a Bluestreak. But for me, as Eiffle 65 prophetically reports; I’m now Blue, daba dee daba di.
