The Reader’s Agency
As stated in my last blog post, New Electronic Media expands digital rhetoric by immersive ways to communicate ideas. Thriving on audience engagement, this new media allows for audiences to engage and even co-create meaning. In this blog, I will be specifically focusing on hypertext and their counterparts, hyperlinks. Hypertexts are defined as a nonlinear system of text that directs readers to related pieces of information within the main text through hyperlink. Unlike traditional print texts, hypertext allows for the reader to guide themselves into their own interpretation of their reading. Aligning with Barthes’s theory that hypertext shifts authority to the reader, that readers create co-meaning and resist closure.
Disruption of the Author-Reader Dynamic
Hypertexts create a shift between the typical author-reader dynamic. In traditional print, the reader is forced into a singular path of interpretation by the author. With the use of hypertext, the reader decides their reading experience. The use of hypertext constructs an evolving system of reader understanding – also known as intertextuality. (Professor Friend, I get it now. I’ll do blog #2). This confirms Barthes’s theory that no text exists in isolation making the reading open-ended and interactive. A current example of this is social media platform, Twitter, in which users can branch off an original text by way of retweet, comments, links and hashtags. Allowing for other users to invent their own path of understanding through interaction rather than imposition.
Hypertext: Reader Agency and Digital Rhetoric
There are two prominent examples that come to mind when focusing on digital rhetoric and reader agency: social media like Twitter and online articles like Wikipedia. These platforms complicate digital rhetorical persuasion as the use of hypertexts and links give emergence to readers shaping their own path to understanding. This means that there is no main text that definitively accounts for the topic at hand. Readers construct various levels of understanding based on their hyperlink path. This forms a challenge in digital rhetoric as discourse must be clear and convincing. Authors must be sure their intended messaging is received for all readers involved; this includes those who only engage in surface-level reading. Although hypertexts can be beneficial in creating clearer understanding, they can also create risk.
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