Text has always been broken up into chunks. Those chunks may have been book-sized, paragraph-sized, lexia-sized, postcard-sized, or twitter-sized, but chunks they were. Hypertext gives the author a system in which to order those chunks, and offers her the chance to develop a rhetoric that surrounds their connection. This ordering need not be linear, which is the fundamental characteristic that started all of the emphasis on hypertext being
essentially non-linear writing. — An emphasis that has turned out to be beside the point. A text can only ever be read in a definite order, one sentence after another, one chapter after another, until the book is set down, the computer powered down, and the reader walks away. Even when the authors of classical hypertexts provided readers with super-connected, highly-networked structures, most readers only explored a small number of paths through the text, and became increasingly frustrated with the work as they encountered the same bits of story over and over again. It tended to leave the bitter feeling of missing crucial turns of plot (as, of course, they were).
However, hypertext does not have to be highly-networked and unordered. The alternatives for textual structure can be laid out into
a rough typology:
Linear: The alpha and omega of textual structure, where a thought progresses along its natural path, and a reader simply follows along. Hypertext theorists often accuse the linear of being beholden to printed text, but print is beholden to speech, and speech is beholden to language. Linear writing is the rest state of hypertext.
Hierarchical: The text falls into a particular ordering, where concepts guide the position of the fragments, and the subordination of auxiliary texts to primary texts. The majority of writing on the web is organized under such hierarchical linking schemes, which are generally referred to as "the navigation." In a strict hierarchy, every fragment of text has a single, logical position, making it easier to browse through quickly.
Networked: Networked texts have the same shape as the championed rhizome (or, root cluster) of post-structuralist thought. Among the influential books that argued their case are Roland Barthes'
S/Z, and Deleuze and Guattari's
A Thousand Plateaus.
The fully networked text is an anti-hierarchical jumble of language, with no center, no beginning, no ending, and no clue about what to read next. It wants to have the status of the eternal, ever-present middle. You may enter where you please, proceed along any path you wish (often retracing your steps many times) and leave when satisfied. These were the sort of texts that hypertext theorists claimed would eventually replace books.
Axial: This place, Hypertextopia, while capable of being used for writing in any of the above styles, tries to foster writing along an axis. Axial hypertext is a kind of hybrid style, from a distance, it looks linear, proceeding in a long line from beginning to end. As you approach, it looks hierarchical, because there are
auxiliary texts (or
shards) constantly branching off the axis. At certain junctures it may appear networked, with loops, sidetracks and alternatives providing more than one way to proceed, or shortcuts back and forth in the text. It's a model that looks to the way that long arguments on the web are actually being constructed — in a long chain, with a definite arc, and side-links scattered for extra shards of information.
As an author, writing for the web and considering these models, you must ask yourself what sort of structure best suits your
thesis, argument, or narrative.
