8. Fragmenting

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For many years, the format of academic inquiry in the humanities has been the article. New forms of academic writing are clearly emerging, and they are tied to hyper-reading. If hyper-reading were not a way to manage the information glut, then collaborative hypertexts would not dominate the reading scene on the Web. Considering that HTML or SGML code can reproduce printed texts in formats identical to printed essays and considering that it is easier to reproduce a printed text in its native format than to convert it to a hypertext, one probably should conclude that the labor-intensive efforts of web-spinners to change printed texts into hypertexts is a response to hyper-reading practices and that the persons who read the Web prefer to read hypertexts. In other words, hyper-readers, especially constructive ones, may prefer fragmented texts to lengthy linear ones. But there is more to this issue than meets the eye.

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If the developers of Storyspace, Jay Bolter, Michael Joyce, John Smith, and Mark Bernstein, are correct in believing that “fragments of text” or “notes” arranged by associative patterns correspond to the cognitive structures readers habitually use (Joyce 31ff.), then the conventional ways of structuring essays are likely to give way to more cognitively resonant ways of reading.¹⁴ In other words, many hyper-readers may be more comfortable selecting textual details and reassembling them in their own virtual frameworks than using the frameworks imposed upon them. If we consider the structure of an argument from the viewpoint of Toulminian informal logic (Given X, if Y, then Z), it appears to be a way of forcing a reader to link specific items of information as an inferential chain (data > warrant > claim). We can consider such inference “patterns to be mechanisms of selection in the sense that the data becomes relevant (is selected as evidence) in light of the warrant. In other words, warrants get the reader to select certain textual details as relevant to a thesis. From this point of view, one might argue that the traditional modes of organizing essays are devices to get readers to combine particular textual details into memorable patterns (see Charney, 242ff.). In this context, essays are written to satisfy readers’ cognitive structures and to make the ideas of their author’s memorable. It should not surprise us, then, if hyper-readers feel liberated from the constraints of such textual guidelines and feel that they are now free to organize textual features in patterns relevant to their own concerns whether logical, topological, or associative. Such textual flexibility is valuable and hypertexts tend to provide it. Hyper-readers, if they are of the constructive variety like me, tend to fragment the texts they read so that they can reassemble them virtually (or actually) in order to satisfy motives germane to their reading activities.

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I hope you can discern in my account of these eight traits of hyper-reading specific advantages for readers of all sorts. When construed apocalyptically as “the end of reading as we know it,” hyper-reading may appear likely to replace reading printed texts. I believe that a more sensible view sees hyper-reading, whether exploratory or constructive, as another way of reading (and writing) which is not likely to supplant the ones we already have since they accomplish different objectives. At this historical juncture, we need to remind ourselves of the gloomy forecasts of the end of the novel that came with the advent of film, the end of radio with advent of television, the end of bookstores with the advent of electronic texts. Though I welcome the advent of hyper-reading, I do see some rain clouds on its horizon.