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Christopher A. Paul
University of Minnesota

Hypertext: The Contemporary Approach

There are two traditional approaches to assessing how hypertexts create meaning: locating the power of definition either in the hands of computer users or programmers. The more common argument is that hypertext radically increases the power of readers because readers set the boundaries of texts as they move through hypertextual environments. George Landow sums this position up: "[T]he basic hypertext experience of the text, information, and control, which moves the boundary of power away from the author in the direction of the reader, models . . . a postmodern, antihierarchical medium of information, text, philosophy and society"(89). Although Landow does not give all power to the reader, he sees a change in the structure of hypertexts that facilitates readers' construction of texts. For Landow, authors have to post and create hypertextual documents, but much of their power ends at the point of production because readers are able to redefine and reshape individual texts within large hypertextual systems like the www. Users stitch multiple texts together, which decenters the role of any author(s).

Lev Manovich argues that the new media culture, typified by the world wide web, is structured "as an infinite flat surface where individual texts are placed in no particular order" (77). Although Manovich does not ascribe the same power to readers that Landow does, the argument that "[t]he two sources connected through a hyperlink have equal weight; neither one dominates the other" extends the general sentiment that readers are able to structure hypertexts, like the web, as they encounter them.  

Espen Aarseth articulates a different take on who holds the power of defining hypertext, arguing that "a hypertext path with only one (unidirectional) link between text chunks is much more authoritarian and limiting than (say) a detective novel, in which the reader is free to read the ending at any time" (47). Effectively programmers are able to determine how open texts are, and hypertexts can be more limiting than offline texts. For Aarseth, although the author can hand power over to readers, that is a decision made by authors; decisions about boundaries of texts reside in the production of the text by programmers. Authors can force readers to view texts in specific ways that limit readers' choices. In Aarseth's model, if a hypertext is opened up, it is because of a decision made by the programmer; the power to signify and regulate circulation resides with them.

Janet Murray attempts to negotiate the space between Landow and Aarseth's positions. She likens programmers to choreographers who write a number of possible dance routines from which users select which dance steps to follow. She writes:

In electronic narrative the procedural author [programmer] is like a choreographer who supplies the rhythms, the context, and the set of steps that will be performed. The interactor, whether as navigator, protagonist, explorer or builder, makes use of this repertoire of possible steps and rhythms to improvise a particular dance among the many, many possible dances the author has enabled. We could perhaps say that the interactor is the author of a particular performance within an electronic story system, or the architect of a particular part of the virtual world, but we must distinguish this derivative authorship of the system itself. (153)

This is an important shift that bridges the gap between Landow and Aarseth, retaining agency in the realm of people, but doing it in a manner that splits the creation of electronic texts into two steps: a programmer/procedural author who writes and creates the text and an interactor who has agency, which, for Murray, is the ability to make choices that determine how the text plays out for them (126).  

These perspectives miss the distinctive character of hypertext in a way that makes analysis more difficult. Aarseth and Landow end with fairly fixed texts set in a specific order by someone, which abrogates the dynamism of hypertextual technology. Murray allays some of these concerns by blending the two positions, but does not escape the trap of ascribing meaning-making to the people engaged in production or consumption of electronic texts. These common approaches to hypertextual analysis are predicated on retaining agency for people, which keeps the focus on what has been produced (texts), rather than the ways that circulation is facilitated and meanings are created (by and through technology) online.

A different literature starts to make a move away from how people retain agency online by taking a critical look at the technologies that enable online communication. Janet Murray makes the observation that eventually all communicative media become "transparent" so focus eventually shifts to the messages crafted within the media, but some scholars argue that by looking critically at the technologies, a more complex analysis of a text becomes possible (26). N. Katherine Hayles observes that "in the Middle Ages the codex book was heralded as a great improvement over the scroll precisely because it allowed for random reading" (99). Like Aarseth, she notes that books can be more open environments than some electronic texts, but central to her claims is analyzing how technologies function in order to make meaning.

Pushing this position even farther, Marie-Laure Ryan argues:

In an electronic environment the reader does not go to the text, the text comes to the screen. Reading hypertext has been widely conceptualized as navigation, but it is because the movement belongs to the text that the reader is much more inclined to explore in an electronic network. With a print text the reader needs to perform a "go to"-targeting a page in a book, a shelf in a library, a store in a town-to obtain new materials, but in electronic texts all the reader needs to do is to click on a link. (214)

Ryan is moving from a reading of a hypertext based on how the words are written or read by people to one of how the technology leads to a different kind of textual encounter. Combining this perspective with Hayles', one starts to develop a position in which the technology used to produce material dramatically impacts how the text is made to mean. Jerome McGann spells out a more specific kind of position along these lines, writing that  

...the apparitions of texts-its paratexts, bibliographic codes, and all visual features-are as important in the text's signifying programs as the linguistic elements...[and] that the social intercourse of texts-the context  of their relations-must be conceived an essential part of the "text" itself: if one means to gain an adequate critical grasp of the textual situation. (11-12)

To clarify this position, McGann argues that "analysis must be applied to the text as it is performative " (206). In combination, these perspectives offer a different mode of looking at technology and how it impacts on the analysis of world wide web texts. In the case of signification on the world wide web, these perspectives require an analysis of how the technologies of the web ensure that circulation functions in a way which is different from offline texts, thereby requiring a shift in analytical methods.  

Changing The Ways That Hypertext is Conceptualized

Working from Donna Haraway's articulation of hypertext, it is possible to refocus ideas about agency onto the technology that enables meaning to be made on the web. My objective is to shift the emphasis from people and their production and place it instead on the ways that hypertexts themselves alter conceptions of "texts" and, by necessary extension, how to do analysis about the web.

Haraway argues that hypertextual nodes "attest, witness, to the implosion of nature and culture in the embodied entities of the world and their explosion into contestations for possible, maybe even livable, worlds in globalized technoscience" (270).  Further, Haraway claims we should look at hypertext as functioning like the child's game cat's cradle, which encourages cooperation with others to make new shapes and meanings through the use of a tool-string- shared by all. Haraway concludes:

A livable worldwide web should be the mutated modest witness's game of cat's cradle, where the end of the millennium becomes a trope for swerving away from the brands that mark us all in the too persuasive stories of the New World Order, Inc. This is the cat's cradle game that the FemaleMan© and OncoMouse [her newly created subject positions] need to learn to play. (271)

By looking at hypertext as a shared, signifying tool, agency is complicated, no longer possessed by autonomous, individualized agents. This opens the possibility of recognizing technologies as forms of agency. Hypertext breaks down barriers, but it remains implicated in what it creates. As a technology, hypertext erodes boundaries and can contest dominant meanings. For Haraway, it is the technology that does this, not the user or the programmer. Circulation among various hypertexts is promoted through the use of hyperlinks, which fundamentally alters how concepts of author, audience, text, and even meaning must be considered in web-based textual analysis. The technologies themselves change the terms of analysis; technology is the base from which resistance can be rallied and counter meanings developed.

The object of analysis is made, shaped, and crafted through the hyperlinks themselves; they are what "define" web-based texts. Most contemporary analyses miss the critical point: rhetorical analysis of hypertext cannot stop at the level of a single website. Web-based textual analysis cannot be crafted by looking at the words, the rhetor or the audience; rather, the crucial part of web-based analysis is considering the hypertextual connections themselves. The technologies and how they are deployed should be the starting point for rhetorical analysis online. This analytical position, focusing on the rhetorical web surrounding a starting text, permits hypertexts to be viewed in different ways, focusing on how they function and offering different perspectives on what they do.

Agency is the opportunity to resignify, to shift meaning. This shift is dependent on changing meaning through accumulations. Haraway argues that hypertext defines by placing things in contexts, that hypertext should be a cooperative process of meaning construction, and that, if agency is shifted to technologies and the connections they facilitate, opportunities for resignification emerge. It is the hypertexts themselves, the technology, that should be viewed as agentic online. With this in mind, textual analysis of the web requires considering not just the initial site, but how the technologies of the web ensure that circulation among a group of texts shapes what the object of analysis "is." Here I start from what makes hypertexts different than offline texts, then move to the content and context surrounding specific hypertexts.


Developing A Method

One of the ways to make the adjustment to studying how technology functions in the signification of web texts is to begin with studies of the role hypertext plays online. Hypertext is what enables the connections between texts, and typical hypertexts are anything but flat or static. Thus an adjustment in the ways that they are studied is necessary. This can be done by understanding the ways in which web texts are grouped as rhetorical webs in online discourse. Hyperlinks allow multiple texts to be connected.  Understanding one in isolation is futile; web pages must be understood in context. The "text" ceases to be a single page, but becomes a group of pages, a rhetorical web that likely will stretch beyond a single url to a variety of different central pages. A "links and resources" or other page designed to provide a number of similarly oriented sites dramatically expands web texts. Movement off the original site and to others redefines the original, as each move does not replace meaning, but accretes, shaping the meaning of each subsequent page through the lens of what has been viewed and knowledge that has been garnered. Accretion also functions in reverse; new pages shape interpretation of what has been seen.  

Identifying and analyzing rhetorical webs focuses on how the web is different, on the technology and how it makes meaning by looking at how circulation occurs on the web. By focusing on the agency resident within the links, scholars are able to analyze something more stable than the transitory texts often found online. The search for "meaning" of the text as found in other textual analyses of the web is placed in the background in order to focus on the technology and how it connects text. This approach results in analysis of a research object which is more stable and results that are more likely generalizeable to far more hypertexts than any individual textual analysis could be. Further, this approach privileges the connections that make the web a different medium of communication. Only looking at a single site or printing out a page from a site artificially fixes the text. As Ryan writes, "I cheated the electronic medium by printing them [passages on a web page] out" (241). Web texts need to be encountered on their own terms, which requires adjustment to how traditional textual analysis is done. Engaging in analysis requires first analyzing how technologies are used to signify within the text, which on the web, requires looking beyond the "initial" text to what surrounds it.

Two Different Rhetorical Webs

As the web has developed, a number of different kinds of sites have been established. Some, particularly those that are sales-oriented or tied to offline corporations, try to maximize the amount of time a web surfer spends on their site. In the case of NYTimes.com, the homepage provides a "center" for the site and employs hyperlinks to create movement to other articles and connections. A digitized version of the New York Times banner is displayed across the top of the front page, framed by two small ads, one for a New York Times Company product and another, which recently hosted Neiman-Marcus, Tiffany, or Columbia University ads. The bulk of the page is sectioned, with a frame on the left that carries through most pages on the site and links to "sections" of the online paper. These sections often are expanded to detailed subsections about the topic that is being viewed, ensuring that the most relevant links are available to users.  

The center of the front page is used in a fashion similar to the above-the-fold section of offline newspapers. Three or four key articles are briefly described, and hyperlinks connect readers to the entire article. There is always a color picture to an article and a handful of other headlines slightly above the editorials of the day. Beneath the featured stories are four additional articles, each with an accompanying picture that links to what typically are in-depth articles. The first few headlines tend to be about current events, but these four stories with pictures contain links to articles from the New York Times Magazine  and other analytical pieces. Beneath these four links are headlines for a variety of key stories divided by section of the paper and links to current AP and Reuters headlines. Ads are featured on the sides of the front page, beneath the key stories, between headlines, in the midst of the sections to the left of the page, and in popunder ads that trigger with access to various pages throughout the site.

The front page of NYTimes.com is interesting because it is fairly flat, more like an offline text than an online one. However, when one moves beyond the home page, the importance of the connections among the texts becomes critical in the functioning of NYTimes.com. When users select which article they wish to read, a click on the link brings them to a separate page that presents the article. Articles are usually split into multiple pages, so that any longer article will be cut into at least two pieces, with links to the other pages at the bottom of each. When looking at an article, user services are provided in the top right corner, with options to email the article, to get a single page view, and to get a printer-friendly page that pops up in a separate window. Each section of the paper is divided into similar segments, with its own sectional homepage providing links to key stories of the day.

The connections facilitated by hyperlinks force similar information to be organized in a manner fundamentally different from that of offline texts. Early versions of the NYTimes.com website looked like the offline paper, but the different dynamics of the web permit alternative relationships to be formed. Instead of organizing articles above the fold and then requiring users to look deeper in the paper to a page where the article is continued, a website can be organized by headlines, with just enough information to hint at what is inside and then presenting the article in its entirety. Splitting the article ensures that no single page is too long, while providing more spaces for advertising. Furthermore the end of the article lists headlines of stories about similar topics. When these are pursued, interpretation and meaning of each page changes.

Articles are no longer singular, they are grouped as they are encountered. Hyperlinks are used to resist the traditional setup of an article, yet are deployed in a manner similar enough to the offline text to limit how much new work has to be done to publish the online version of the paper. NYTimes.com is also integrating a personal news tracker into the site that ties issues of interest to a personal user profile. This, combined with the links at the end of stories, proffers an experience of reading that is different from that of the offline version of The New York Times . Texts are collected in such a way that articles are grouped together with a focus on specific issues, but the deployment of the Times online allows that grouping to transcend a specific day's news and can offer the same article in multiple different groupings.

Hyperlinks deny the creation of a stable, singular text. Each encounter with a hypertext is likely to be at least slightly different from any other and the number of links that can spin outward prevents the existence of any "fixed" text. The dynamics of computerized information mean that the paper becomes an archive of stories on the web. Instead of singular, discrete issues that are published each day, NYTimes.com offers a database of stories that accrete over time. Instead of an issue of variable size, with a fixed limit each day, NYTimes.com is constantly expanding with no clear bounds. This problematizes a textual analysis of NYTimes.com because there is little stability. There is no daily edition that become fixed and delivered to subscribers to critique. Instead, the potential for connections drives how the site functions. Yesterday's New York Times  is always available and the lead story for any given edition is fixed, but the leads on NYTimes.com can and do change in an hour. Stories change as news develops, the online paper is physically reorganized as news breaks, and different sections are promoted at the paper's whim. All of these characteristics resist a traditional, offline-style analysis of NYTimes.com.

Further, the connections among texts mean that reading the online version is a process of accumulation, with each new page adding to the definition of what the site or story "is." The text that is NYTimes.com is never fixed; reflecting on the ways technology crafts a rhetorical web alters the analytical approach to produce more durable, fixed texts with which to work, while retaining much of the dynamism of the web. Although any representation of a hypertext necessarily fixes it in ways that are artificial, this critical description based on the site's connectivity is an example of how to analyze without losing sight of the larger goal and preserving the role of technology in signification. Further, a general awareness of these problems in the first place enables a more thoughtful, accurate representation of what is happening in hypertexts. NYTimes.com is a rhetorical web, a dynamic creation that changes and accumulates, where meaning is not made through singular texts, but through the accumulations of meaning created by hypertext links. This approach may also produce a more stable text to analyze, as the way technologies are employed and the effect technologies have on NYTimes.com are far more likely to be stable on a day-to-day basis than any article is.

In addition to the structural features of the paper, online advertising requires a more flexible approach to textual analysis. In an offline paper, ads surround text, often buried in the margins and occasionally taking up a page or more. Offline, ads are rarely found on the front page as they are on NYTimes.com, but online, that move does not seem particularly intrusive. Further, beyond surrounding and framing the paper, online ads become part of the article. Feature articles on NYTimes.com often contain at least two ads, one in the body of the text and one that either pops up in front of or under the article. On NYTimes.com, ads become part of the visual landscape and are integrated into the content. Instead of taking up a page of the newspaper or lingering at the end of a column, NYTimes.com ads can be located in the middle of an article, even splitting sentences.

Beyond the placement of the ad, the hypertextual components of the web facilitate the blending of ad and content. The most striking distinction is that the online ads can take users from the content directly to the advertiser's site. An ad for Orbitz does not just hype the savings they offer, but also can take users to the site itself, where they can book their travel deal. In this sense, and through the technology, the advertisers are integrated into NYTimes.com. It is not just that the ads are part of the text, but when discussing what constitutes NYTimes.com, it is imperative to move from the local site and understand the other sites users can access. NYTimes.com is implicated in the ads, and the functioning of the site requires acknowledging their role. This stretches beyond an offline, flat ad into dynamic relationships, in which the connections between the paper and the advertisers are more complete. Online advertisers not only buy space to place a message, but hyperlinks act as a virtual middleperson, connecting users to the advertised product and corporate sponsor.

Looking at the ways that the site is composed of articles that are read and advertisements that are integrated into them more accurately represents NYTimes.com. NYTimes.com is not a mere host to the ads. Rather, the advertisers' sites, which shape understanding of the pages of NYTimes.com, are a constitutive part of the meaning of this rhetorical web. Hypertext in this case is clearly ideological, adding impact to an advertiser's voice and turning NYTimes.com into a practical, virtual display window. Advertisers are given more than the voice they get offline in a print ad; they also receive the potential space to complete their sales.

The final use of hypertext is in the internal links that promote movement within the site. Offline a paper can run a group of stories on the same topic or include graphics and diagrams, which do not translate particularly well online. The main advantage of NYTimes.com is that other stories can actually be brought into the article being read. NYTimes.com often includes links to similar issues at the end of the desired article, but also links to business profiles and stock ticker information. This makes their articles dynamic. In the most basic sense, the links at the end of an article modify what is being read. Instead of gaining information from a single article, information accretes as each subsequent article modifies those that came before. This happens to people offline as they gain information, but hyperlinks promote these relationships online in a manner that defies the bounds of individual texts. The story is opened up to a number of possible links, changing the meaning of any potentially discrete offline sites. More importantly, the insertion of business updates within the text alters how articles are read. More information is available, but hyperlinks change the context of the information, uniting what would be divorced in a hard copy edition of The New York Times  and enacting ideological moves through the connections facilitated through the technology.

A key feature of how hypertext is deployed on NYTimes.com is how it is designed to keep web surfers on NYTimes.com, rather than moving them to other sites to complement the information found on NYTimes.com. Many stories contain hyperlinks, but they are almost always links to other parts of NYTimes.com, whether that is to their profiles of businesses, their stock ticker information, or similar articles. There are only a handful of exceptions to this general approach. One major exception is found within the advertisements discussed above. Links to advertisers' websites are by far the largest group of external links found on NYTimes.com. The other, much smaller exception is found in stories about the web, where links are almost required in order to present the story. In cases where NYTimes.com is reporting about specific websites or trends on the web they will often offer external links, although this is typically done only in situations where a link adds to the story. Links are not generally added when NYTimes.com quotes a representative from a websites for a story, nor are they offered in cases where other sites could simply provide more information about an issue. For NYTimes.com, the focus of the site is on keeping people tied to NYTimes.com and making money through links to advertisers, not necessarily on conveying the greatest amount of information on current events.

A different genre of sites recognizes and maximizes the ability of hypertext to move people physically from viewing one thing to another. Social movement pages are dependent on shared beliefs, rather than generation of funds or selling of users attention, and online, most sites seek to invoke like-minded sites to advance the goals of the "original." One of the first online feminist journals, Brillo ( http://www.brillomag.net ) published only three issues, but their "Hitlist" used hyperlinks to advance their feminist ideology ( http://www.brillomag.net/No1/hitlist.htm ). It facilitated critique through dynamic, hypertextual links between the home page and sites to which they were opposed. In this case, Brillo encouraged readers to use the technology of the web to anonymously visit sites that stood in opposition to Brillo's feminist ideology. In addition to visiting the site, readers were asked to contact the creators of these sites to protest their messages. In doing this, Brillo extended their reach, using digital technology to facilitate a critique of hate sites, while honing their feminist message. Meaning in this case is not limited to the discourse on Brillo's site or on the sites to which they link, but in the connections themselves, in the rhetorical webs created through using the technologies of the web.

Another interesting way Brillo integrates hyperlinks into its presentation is by sinking hyperlinks into the interviews conducted with like minded sites (http://www.brillomag.net/No1/water.htm ). Although not a unique move, this expands what Brillo is, reaching beyond the text that they have written or the interview they have conducted to contextualize what occurs within the site and in the interview. This dynamic relationship could be paralleled in ways offline, but only to a point. An offline publication could not reach much beyond the introduction given to the organization, but the hypertextual connection binds the two sites together, radically increasing the information within the interview. Although many of the linked sites are now dead links, the intent can still be noticed. Separately, the inclusion of hyperlinked talking points in the introduction of the interviews allow readers to skip to certain parts of the interview. By doing this hyperlinks change the text from a linear reading to one where web browsers and hyperlinks allow movement around the interview. Analyzing Brillo requires looking at both the original publication and how it connects to the sites to which it links.

In a similar, but far larger effort, Feminista! ( http://www.feminista.com ) uses their website as a hub to push users to a variety of different sites. Feminista! includes a massive number of offsite links, requiring an analysis of the site to stretch beyond those urls that are in the control of Feminista!. By offering a "Women's Guide to the Web" and their now defunct "Weekly Web Review," which offered a summary of an issue by referencing a number of other websites, Feminista! facilitates movement off its site, but those moves are, at least initially, contextualized by the Feminista!'s feminist ideology. Feminista! uses these links to comment upon the web, to offer its users a chance to move off the site and to comment on the web at large. Feminista! is a prime example of a rhetorical web, of how the connections on a site shape both its content and context, as it privileges the content of other sites, often at the expense of staying on its site. The way that Feminista! uses hyperlinks should preclude any attempt to analyze it as a traditional, flat text. In this case, Feminista!'s hyperlinks characterize what the site does and how it functions. Without the use of hyperlinks Feminista! could not be the same sort of resource that it is. It surely parallels offline resource texts, like reference guides or a compendium of like minded organizations, but on the web all of those external sites are brought into connection with Feminista! and by doing this a rhetorical web is forged that requires acknowledgment of the connections made online in order to recognize how Feminista! works.

What Rhetorical Webs Mean

The textual analysis of the world wide web needs to be reconceptualized. Current analyses of the world wide web are in a position where focusing on technology and the ways that it functions to craft meanings could stabilize how to do analysis, enabling traditional tools to be used, while preserving the dynamism of the web. Web analyses can explore connections made among texts, adapting offline tools with care and fulfilling the goal for internet research set out by Warnick in the early part of her book. The technologies are what make online texts different, and understanding them is the first step toward sound, thorough analysis of websites. By recognizing how hyperlinks create rhetorical webs, a more stable text to analyze is generated. The key to this kind of analysis is to focus on how the technology, ie the hyperlinks, function to change discourse online. It is this connectivity that shifts agency, making the medium collaborative and leading toward analysis that focuses on the online performances of texts, through the repetitions of messages enabled online.  

The key aspect of rhetorical webs is the renewed emphasis it places on the technology enabling the texts to exist in the first place. In doing this, hyperlinks themselves are rediscovered as agentic; they are what signify on the web. In doing this, hyperlinks can be deployed in a number of different ways, like reifying the corporate goals of The New York Times Company or contesting dominant meanings of feminism and racist ideologies as exemplified by the hyperlinks of Brillo . NYTimes.com uses links to turn users inward, to create a rhetorical web largely limited to material created by The New York Times Company or its advertisers. In this case, the rhetorical web is limited by design to create a site that holds attention and is a terminal destination for websurfers. On the other hand, Brillo and Feminista! spin users outward, using like-minded sites to spread their message and extend the reach of their ideological goals. Their rhetorical web is far reaching, providing users with a number of different resources. Authors and readers certainly play a role in the production and consumption of these texts, but by turning to the links themselves more stable texts are generated that better represent online discourse. In doing this, rhetorical webs offer scholars a method of web analysis that privileges what makes web texts unique.  


References

Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Haraway, Donna J. OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Hayles, N. Katherine. Writing Machines. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT University Press, 2001.

McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

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