Blog 9

While reading Doug Brent’s article “Rhetorics of the Web: Implications for Teachers of Literacy” I became a bit frustrated and dizzy. First of all I was not entirely sure about what his real argument was, but as I continued clicking and reading through the article he read my mind. Brent stated that, “If this seems altogether too chaotic, maybe it means that hypertext just isn't a good medium for argument in the first place”. That was exactly what I was thinking! I know that when writing this he had a specific purpose and objectives that he wanted to accomplished, so I wonder if part of his goal was to make us question about how arguments may get lost when presented in hypertext form in which a reader reads differently than he or she is accustomed to. Frustrated and dizzy as I was I continued reading and clicking and found something that confirmed my suspicions when analyzing Kolb and his belief in the viability of hypertext and rhetoric he acknowledges that, “he is not convinced that hypertext is a very good medium for argument as we have come to know it, and neither am I.” I wonder if writing this article in a “nonlinear” way was Brent’s way of demonstrating his beliefs in the complexity and confusing nature of presenting a rhetorical argument in hypertext. Perhaps I am one of few that are bothered by the way in which he made his point. While I read and clicked I found myself wishing that this article was written in paper, but then I thought that this maybe was a better or the only way to write an article about rhetorics of the web.

“Even documents posted in html and broken into separate nodes often contain "next" links at the bottom of each page to encourage the reader to put them right back in linear order again, which makes one ask why they should have been broken up in the first place.”

And this quote just threw me completely off! Why compose html documents and break them apart, if in the end the reader (ME) will be tempted to arrange and read such text in a linear fashion?? I truly do believe that hypertext is different than print text. I believe that linearity is extremely important. Hypertext indeed enables the reader to be more interactive with the text and feel more ownership of what lines are read, what is clicked, ignored and re-read, but print text offers a sort of simplicity and order that hypertext fails to provide. It would be interesting to see if any research has been done regarding the existence and absence of “linearity” in different types of texts. While there may be differing opinions about what this “linearity” does to text, I believe that the fact that Brent discussed this in his article is proof enough that we cannot be quick to give preference to one over another.