The Space Between

Instance Issues

Praxis aside, we can start to see here that the space between the author and reader is bridged by hypertext. The author is nowhere to be found in print. The words are isolated on the page and must speak for themselves, combining with the readers’ knowledge of the text and the context. The author is physically absent from this interaction. The reader must fend for himself.

Yet networked hypertext allows for instant communication (sometimes) with the author of a text. When a reader has a question, many hypertexts allow the reader to either e-mail or leave a comment for the author, who can then respond. This is especially visible on those miracles of Web 2.0, blogs. The resulting dialogue between authors and readers becomes part of the hypertext, displayed along side the author-generated content on the Web, akin to marginal notes in a print volume. The author can use these comments to address shortcomings that readers see in the writing, even possibly editing the hypertext to incorporate ideas suggested by readers. The hypertext is not fixed at all. It is always unfinished.

If it is always unfinished, then the author never really leaves the hypertext behind. She never vacates. With a printed monograph, there comes a time when the text must be declared finished. It must be left alone so that publishers can take over and bind those words in books. The word “binding” indicates exactly what happens. The text is locked up, taken out of the dialogic instant and frozen. The words’ living meaning is robbed from them. Like putting a slab of meat in the freezer, the binding and printing process halts the natural processes that might act on an unfinished text. Revisions cease, and by the time the text comes out of the freezer, perhaps in a revised edition, the thoughts contained in it are spoiled.

Hypertexts are never finished. The words are always fresh. Drafts are always rough, however polished their wordings. But what problems arise when the author is somehow present at the “instance” of reading? Does the reader lose a sense of his own power when the author is always there to guide him to a “correct” interpretation? The space that separated the author and reader when print reigned as the top notch on the technological ladder gets removed (re-placed?). As with a hyperlink, we jump over that “space” and have instant immediacy.

Initially, in the early 1990s when hypertext was becoming popular, this was hailed as a boon for the reading process. What could be better than giving the author a chance to answer her readers? But there’s another way to look at that authorial absence. Perhaps that space between author and reader was for the reader’s benefit, the space that the reader had to himself, the buffer between the constantly applied “intentional fallacy” and the reader’s own interpretations. Now, hypertext has violated that space by allowing the writer back into reading life.

Remember the anecdote about the author sitting in the audience at an academic conference, listening to what he thought was a misinterpretation of his text. His complaint was answered flatly, “You’re just one reader.” Hypertext upends that idea. Sure, everyone has the technical ability to become an author and then to comment and influence others’ hypertextual publications, but once you write something, the very tools used to author that text provide plenty of features to guarantee that you’ll always be considered its author. The hypertext writer can always have the final say, no matter how many comments she receives. Yes, hypertext combined with the features of a modern computer will allow a user to copy/paste that text to somewhere else and to modify it freely, but that’s no longer the same text. It’s a mash-up, a portmanteau, a derivational work that shares a bloodline with another text but is not the same.