This is an excerpt from a post I just entered on Learning to Spin, but wanted to load it in here as LTS is a class journal that will bite the dust soon:
And, we played with paper. In the New Media class I was happy for days fiddling with the handed-out Mobius strip. In this class, we folded a plain piece of paper in such a way that corner flaps were created and various writing surfaces were then made available. The professor had us write a story, a sentence at a time in separate areas, then hand it to a classmate and read the story. Obviously, the narrative structure is affected by what is opened and read first. The sequence, and thus the story, is completely in the control of the reader.
This was a visual introduction to hypertext fiction, and the added necessity of the writer to consider this unusual form to, while not maintain control–that will always be up to the reader–but to insure that wherever the reader goes, the story flows. The point was easily made, and while it puts additional work on the writer or planner of a story, it is in fact more controlling, given certain facts about readers. Most readers will read a book from left to right. Some might skip a few pages. But there’s always that one in a million who whether out of curiousity or for titillation or I guess we might include research, refuses to follow the established pattern and skips around to his heart’s delight.
Oh, oh, oh and next week? We’re gonna see how this works on a computer software program! A real New Media Moment!
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology