5. Filming— “. . . but I saw the film”

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In his history of film, Kracauer comes close to arguing that superior films have more images than words. In instances where films are made from novels or plays, pictures translate many of their words. The ratio of image to word is, of course, quite different in novels and films. A similar remark can be made about hyper-reading. In the construction of hyper (media) texts—regardless of their significance—graphics often play a more meaningful role than words. Hyper-readers turn the graphics on web pages into virtual montages using “conventions similar to cinematic ones (probably learned from countless hours of watching TV and film). And, as the Internet expands, graphical elements will be constructed with such hyper-readers in mind just as good photographers compose their pictures with specific viewers in mind (see Bernhardt on “graphically rich” hypertexts, 168–170). As I mentioned above, some persons will regard the tendency in hyper-readers to prefer graphical to verbal elements when deriving meaning or significance from web pages as a loss of conceptual depth. Nor is it surprising that persons weaned on literature should find texts with fewer words than pictures less likely to contain “serious” ideas. This, I believe, is a prejudice.

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At this juncture, I should note that in the next three sections the act of hyper-reading becomes almost indistinguishable from the act of writing. Constructive hyper-readers are de-facto hyper-writers because they tend to assemble the texts they read. This qualifies, I suspect, as trespassing the boundaries we usually assign to the categories “literature” (reading) and “composition” (writing).