Hello User And Goodbye Paper
Readers became users and as a consequence their expectations from the text have changed. They get easily distracted jumping from text to text, from tab to tab, to come back later to what they were reading earlier (if they ever do so). Moreover, the hypertext has created a space where the readers are allowed to play an active role deciding what and how they read. The invention of the Internet has permitted the users to construct their own narrative in a much easier way by making decisions and creating links suitable for their needs, and therefore the web functions as an endless work in progress. The user has become a “virtual flaneur”, wandering the web, looking for the right content as suggested Goldsmith (2011). More importantly, the reader has the agency to decide what is better for their reading and weave an expanded web of references. By expanding the web, the reader is allowed to see many other options that were unseen previously, challenging and questioning what was thought.
However, this is not something completely new. Think about a newspaper. The way we read it is different to a book and still very similar to a website. The reader jumps from one article to another while skipping a few in the middle. Similarly, with the internet, readers have learnt to manage, pick and collect information without feeling they need to read linearly as they would with a printed book.
Nevertheless, the introduction of the internet brought another change which has also affected the way users approach the information they find, e.g. display, filter or aggregate content to what they were reading. When, how, and where we read makes a difference on the perception of a text, and as Lupton (2006) argues in The Birth of the User, “how texts are used becomes more important than what they mean”.
Instead of leaving annotations on a book, now we comment on websites. Comments, likes, tagging other people… have become the marginalia of the internet. Even though taking a different and less tangible aesthetic, they allow a space to dialogue, share knowledge and responses to what was published. In fact, as argued by Ludovico (2012), the power for digital publishing lies on its “superior networking capabilities” and not only by hosting related content to what you read elsewhere but on “other humans willing to share their knowledge online”. This willingness to share knowledge in the hyperspace is the same we find in a library where multiple people read a same book in a different way and leave their notes as an unconscious: I have been here, I read this book, and this is my contribution to it.
The active reader seems intrinsic of the digital medium where taking decisions and to follow your own path seems easier and natural. However, this doesn’t mean that it is an exclusive aspect from the hyperspace, in fact it was born in the printed book. Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov, pre-dates the internet although it can be seen as a prototype of hypertext. Nabokov uses footnotes to build several directions in which the readers can immerse in. Moving back and forth following links, the participants decide what route they are interested in, working as a primitive hypertext system that reminds us to an “analogue” website. Regardless of what path the reader decides to follow, the user can have an endlessly stimulating literary experience. This work was perceived as an experimental, ground-breaking book by enhancing the literary experience. Besides, it allowed multiple readings of the work by interlocking elements to tell many stories at once.
Another piece from the same period is Composition No.1 (1960) by Marc Saporta, an unbounded book confined in a box. Each page has a self-contained narrative, giving to the reader agency to decide the order they read the book and when to stop. The way users read this book nowadays, raises questions about user-centric, non-linear driven ways of reading – native traits from the hyperspace. The reason that these works were, and still are, relevant is because they reflected a change on the role of the readers, giving them authority to collaborate with the writer on the production of the literary work.
Currently, the way we read them equals to the reading experience you can obtain in the hyperspace. In fact, in 1969, IBM used Pale Fire for a demo of an early hypertext-like system (which didn’t go through in the end). Therefore, Nabokov not only anticipated the upcoming invention of the internet but also created the one of the first books of the genre, being seen afterwards as “father” of the hypertext.
