Looking through These Waves of Girls by Caitlin Fisher I must admit I started to get annoyed reading it. To keep clicking and get to another path of the story and suddenly that path stops and I have to go back annoys me; I like to have a book where I know where the beginning and the end is. It can be fun to a start but I cannot keep it up for long. It slowly begins to bore me and make my head tired, maybe because I generally hate to read from a screen. Off course it does make it fun with the pictures and the colors, however it is not enough to capture my attention for long, but I must admit that it is a creative and fun way of presenting a story.
The Openingsources.com is a website where everyone can edit a text how they like it, I can see the fun in this. Especially in class where Bent Sørensen presented it to us, the text suddenly got edited rather quickly and you could easily figure out that the other persons in the classroom was the ones doing the most editing, this made it fun to both witness and be a part of. However, doing it at home after class was no fun at all! I spend a maximum of 2 minutes at the side because the editing was slow and there were no personal interaction to it as far as I knew. We had a question to this hypertext: “who is in charge?” I do not see it as anyone being in charge, it is more like a war going on between whoever is playing the game.
In Conclusion I must say that hypertexts are not really for me, I am old fashioned and prefer a nice book in my hands where I only have to turn over a page once in a while, knowing that it will end when there is no more pages to turn, instead of sitting at a computer and clicking through a story which may never end.
Fair observations all around, with a balanced view of pros and cons, also for you personally. The most interesting observation for me was that opening.sources can be very dull if no-one else is using it simultaneously. It's interesting that this text works best when a collective are in charge of it, temporarily...
ReplyDeleteI agree completely with your viewpoints as I am quite old fashioned as well and need a book with a proper linear narrative.
ReplyDeleteI like that you, in your attempt of answering the class question, compares the use of opening.sources to war - this observation goes well with the feeling of anarchy I feel when using these sorts of hypertexts.
And, as Bent writes, your observation of opening.sources being a social activity which loses its fun when used alone is very interesting indeed.