Making sense of digital textuality

Abstract

One of the fundamental developments brought about by interactive and multilinear digital technology is the greater structural fragmentation of texts and the consequent re-evaluation of textual coherence. While the concept of text is contingent on some internal coherence, the new text type of electronic hypertext places new challenges on this paradigm by allowing ways of reading texts which would appear to disturb rather than build coherence. In relying on the flexible negotiation of readerly expectations with actual continuities experienced as the reading progresses, hypertextual coherence both encourages us to re-evaluate the rules of textual coherence from a more pragmatically oriented point of view and echoes some of the most recent theoretical views of how we interpret words in their surrounding co-text. This article presents an outline for a linguistic analysis of hypertextual coherence and points out the new dimensions of coherence left unaccounted for by conventional models. What happens when multilinearity makes texts unstable? How do we discuss a text – or meaningfully refer to one – if each reading has the power of transforming the potential narrative lines of a hypertext into a new literary object which may have never existed prior to that reading? Digital media rely on a new understanding of texts not as definitive objects, but as networks of relationships and meanings which by their very nature are relative, transitory, and subject to change at any moment. The potentially disturbing effects of such textual characteristics are counter-acted by the new, more fluid concept of digital coherence.

Keywords:

• hypertext
• hyperlink
• coherence
• cohesion
• expectation
• fragmentation

Notes

1 For an opposing view, see Engebretsen (2000).