Hypertextual Reading

In Chapter 3, Jones and Hafner note that one advantage to hypertextual reading is that the reader can choose her own path of reading. This idea made me think of The Handmaid’s Tale and the creative choices made by the author, Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid’s Tale is a story about a misogynistic, futuristic society in which women who were capable of giving birth were assigned to households in which the wife is barren in an effort to realize the real place of women—to give birth. The story is set up as a script created by a scholar who found a series of “tapes” recorded by an escaped handmaid and transcribed them. The appendix also provides a script of his presentation at a scholarly audience in which he, as a literature professor, analyzes the content. I always wondered what would happen if each of the sections of the novel (what equates to one tape per section) were actually recorded in audio (as the story suggests) and displayed in a hypertext document in scattered audio pieces. How would our understanding of the novel change or not change, as the case may be? The reader could listen to whichever sections she wanted to in whatever order she wanted to. Same with the appendix. I wonder if we would “understand” the novel in the same way. The sections of the novel were arranged, according to the scholar, “in the order they appeared to go.” What if they were read out of order? What if we read everything out of order? What kind of agents would we be? What would the novel mean then? I remembering seeing the movie, which was a poor representation, and thinking that the “voice” of the main actress was not the voice as I “heard” when I was reading the novel. In fact, I thought the movie voice was childish. I also listened to a dramatic reading of the novel, which instead of changing the voice I heard in my head, strengthened the agency of it. Which media did I play a more active role in as a reader? What about these different versions did I take advantage of or feel constrained by?

The case study about blogs made me think about why I assigned blogs in this class. I wanted more than the discussion forums in Blackboard. I had used the discussion forums for a previous totally online class and they were not as successful as I had hoped. I thought the students contributed well, but I read the students post in the gradebook area of Blackboard, which made grading much easier, but did not go back and post in the discussion forum. Because of this, I think I seemed absent from the class discussions. I didn’t have time to respond in the gradebook and then go back and respond in the discussion forum, so I chose grading. This semester, I decided to use blogs because I thought they would feel more like a conversation and because students would control their own blogs, which gave them agency. Jones and Hafner talk about how blogs allowed readers/writers to “talk back” to the author. But so did the Blackboard discussion forums, yet, I am enjoying the blog discussions more. They seem more active, more engaged, and more attentive. I feel more like I’m having a conversation with students rather than talking at them through grading.

I do like the idea of a “blog” community, as Jones and Hafner discuss, which I don’t think Blackboard offered in the same way. I feel the same sense of community with Facebook. I’ve only been an avid user of Facebook for about a year or two. I know it’s getting to be old now, but I find that I really feel a sense of a community and that I am talking to people I know and care about (maybe a few that I don’t). Jones & Hafner note that “online contexts lend themselves to the development of communities of readers.” I think I am definitely doing that and I hope students are engaged in the same way.