too....much....information....

I thought that the excerpt by Katherine Hayles from “Writing Machines” was still a difficult reading, but I thought her arguments were a bit more reasonable than McLuhan’s. One quote that I really liked was on the first page and says, “As the vibrant new field of electronic textuality flexes its muscle, it is becoming overwhelmingly clear that we can no longer afford to ignore the material basis of literary production.” That quote emphasizes the point of this excerpt, which is that the actual material form of writing is extremely important. Lexia to Perplexia was really confusing and frustrating to look at but it showed how important the medium is to the message.

When compared to McLuhan’s writing, I feel that Hayles addresses the relationship between the message and media in a more realistic way rather than saying the medium is the message. I agree with this view much more. One interesting idea I found in Hayles writing was that the medium isn’t just the book, movie, or internet itself, but it is the actual physical aspects of the medium. For example, on page 22 she describes that the binding of a book or the opaqueness of the paper all effect how the message is received. I had never really thought about these seemingly insignificant aspects of a medium. One connection I thought of in class (and then was used as an example about one minute later), was Goosebumps “choose your own adventure” books. You would have to pick what you wanted to do and then the book would tell you what page to go to. According to Hayles, this act of being link driven is called hypertext. Hypertext can also be seen in encyclopedias, movies (Momento), and obviously the internet. Some of the other words that Hayles describes in her writing are cybertext, which is more focused on images and is seen in computer games, and technotext, which has a body and has rich connections between its material properties.

In the next chapter she talks about Talan Memmott’s “Lexia to Perplexia”. I read her article before I viewed the website and I was really confused. I had no idea what she was talking about, and so I thought that looking at the website might help. After looking at the website, I realized why I was so confused. The website was a total overload. There were so many layers and it kept changing. The main point that I got out of her writing on this was that the website would not work without you, but the website also had a lot of control over what was happening. This is why it was so frustrating to look at. Hayles describes this when she states, “the subject does not exist apart from the technology.” While I was exploring the site I saw so many words and definitions I had never heard of that after about 15 seconds I just began to click furiously and did not read anything. Perhaps the author was trying to say that its meaning is unstable and that there is no way to make a full interpretation of it. Moreover, that meaning is multiple and that it evolves.

Both Hayles writing on how the media effects the message and on lexia to perplexia, made the it clear that how a subject is presented has huge effects on how you recieve the message. Lexia to Perplexia was a great example of an extreme presentation of a certain message. It made you frustrated, yet it also made you think about WHY he presented this information in such an odd way.