I began reading the hyperlink fiction articles with a somewhat opened mind. I have never read anything online with exception to a few online articles. I had always preferred reading hard copy texts, after reading these hypertexts I have found that view strengthened.
I found the Charmin’ Cleary text to be extremely difficult to read. I constant clicking to figure out which part of the story I had not read previously was distracting to the actual reading process. I feel as though the hyperlinked fiction of this particular text caused a loss of desire to actually read what would normally be an exciting or at least intriguing topic for a novel. The confusion of the text caused me to get lost in the digital aspect of the website, rather than the literature and meaning of the story.
To continue my rant on hypertext, the Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce, I thought the blue text on the blue background was extremely distracting and hindering to the reading process. In order to read the text, I first had to highlight the page then read. I found this to be an impractical way to read, however this story was easier to follow because there was only one hyperlinked text to follow. The storyline to the Twelve Blue text was at some points interesting, but uneventful and bland during other portions of the text.
Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce seemed to be set up in a more coherent hypertext fashion, with exception to the poor web design of blue text on blue background. I understand the theme of the text is blue, however I believe the amount of blue should be limited. I felt as though this type of fiction or the storyline of the novel was uninteresting to me, but could be interesting to other readers.
As for Charmin’ Cleary by Edward Falco, I wish I could have been able to follow this story because I found it to have an interesting plot, but the format of the hypertext was to confusing. If I had been reading a hard copy of the same text, I believe I would have been glued to the book until the end.
The critic in me agrees with you. But the part of me that sees the good in all forms of media is aching to cry out, so here goes:
ReplyDeleteAs far as the stories go, Charmin' Cleary was cool, kind of like a detective novel with a mouse. Twelve Blue totally lost me. There were so many characters, with very little intelligible background, that I could not follow what was going on. I know there was a deaf kid swimming, a girl drowning, then a divorce, but I couldn't tell you much else about it.
At one point, I did get frustrated with the amount of searching I had to do to find unread pages in Charmin' Cleary, but this effect had me hungry for more words, unread clues I had to find.
Hypertext is cool, and in my opinion, we had a good example and a poor one. But I don't think it will catch on. My guess is that it will go the way of the "Choose Your own Adventure" books, in which there is a choice to be made at the end of each section, and each choice will take you to a new page. These were fascinating to me as a young reader, for about a year, until I started really reading...