hypertext and hypermedia
Although some researchers use the terms hypertext and hypermedia interchangeably, or understand hypertext as including hypermedia (or vice versa), the distinction between the two terms is still useful in order to make sense of the challenging changes that continue to characterize 21st-century means of communication. For this purpose, hypermedia is defined here as the complex technology that enables multimedia communication through hypertexts. Taking this perspective implies that hypertexts can be defined as dynamic and interactive meaning-making practices. Notwithstanding their limitations, these definitions are meant to introduce the following discussion of these two terms.
The tremendous impacts of hypertext and hypermedia upon contemporary communication are to be found at cognitive, semiotic, political, economic, and social levels, and therefore, a wide array of viewpoints have to be taken into consideration. The technological innovations that have made possible the appearance of hypertext and hypermedia have sometimes been assessed in various research communities as either emancipatory or oppressive, and the discussion of their impacts upon communication has also been polarized. However, enthusiastically advocating for the empowering benefits of hypertext and hypermedia or skeptically warning against their manipulative potentials might not be the only available choice. A balancing act is needed. A constant reassessing of both the gains and the losses that our knowledge-based society will continue to witness in the future can be another way of addressing the challenging impacts of hypertext and hypermedia upon communication. Moreover, such a reassessment is supposed to consider these impacts in a larger environment of contemporary communication in order to trace instances of remediation too, namely, to reveal how characteristics of old media are replaced or appropriated and incorporated.
This entry defines and discusses hypermedia and hypertext making a necessary distinction between the two terms. The first part outlines the transition from text to hypertext, highlighting the dynamic and hypermodal character of hypertext. The second part addresses the hypertext’s multilinear, multiauthored, and multimodal character in order to explain the transition from text readers to hypertext users. The third part explains how the nonlinear hypermedia context is defined by the personalized navigation activity of the hypertext users. The implications for this type of activity are also taken into consideration.
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From Text to Hypertext
Briefly, hypertext cannot be defined as just an electronic format of text. Scholars define hypertext as an array of meaning-making practices and suggest that its dynamic and interactive character is related to how it can be accessed and how it can be continuously assembled. The linear and hierarchical progression of a traditional text is replaced in hypertext by a series of alternative pathways that allow access to content chunks or nodes by means of electronic links. The number of content chunks that can be electronically linked is virtually unlimited as one can access online texts of various sizes, which include other links relating to other texts containing other links and so on. It should be mentioned here that there are various types of electronic links, and they can also provide the opportunity to trace one’s steps back from one content chunk to the other. The number of content chunks that can be electronically linked may also be increased by several authors when the hypertext is dynamic, namely, when it allows itself to be altered in the course of interaction. This dynamic character of hypertext generates a more or less permanent state of ephemerality, which cannot be encountered in any traditional text. Such a state of instability affects many fields of activity (e.g., research and education) because, if not retrieved instantly, the greatest majority of hypertexts might be difficult to access again in the exact same configuration as links and content chunks can be incessantly readjusted. For example, both for research and educational activities, the retrieval of the original versions of specific news articles might be hindered by such continuous transformations.
Apart from this, the content chunks can be both monomodal, that is, including only one communicative mode (e.g., written text), and multimodal, that is, including several communicative modes (e.g., images, speech, and sound). It is obvious that all texts are multimodal in that they always use a combination of communicative modes to produce meaning; for example, even in a traditional written text, the visual mode also contributes to meaning making through elements of layout or choice of letters. However, in hypertext environment, the interplay of modes has been accelerated and intensified by technological developments that allow new multimodal configurations to appear. In this environment, the communicative modes are dynamic resources for making meaning in various types of texts (e.g., verbal, visual, aural) that can be realized in a range of different converging media—from animation and film to graphics and audio streams. These texts can include a wide range of hybrid generic structures from interactive websites, wikis, and blogs to interactive fiction and games, which would not have been possible to design before the appearance of hypertext affordances. Transitional and intermediate generic configurations keep emerging, and they will continue to evolve due to rapid technological developments.
The conflation of multimodality and hypertextuality has been labeled hypermodality by researchers in order to highlight that the dynamic web of connectivity that characterizes hypertexts goes beyond monomodal texts with recurrent and recognizable characteristics. In order to communicate in a nonlinear way, the modes can be integrated in a multimedia environment that allows these co-deployed modes to interact in content chunks that are electronically linked. For example, chunks of texts in the hypertextual versions of news articles can be linked to filmed interviews, to bloggers’ or vloggers’ comments, and to whole websites related to the specific topic(s) of the respective articles. Hypermedia can thus be described as the complex technology that enables multimedia communication through hypertexts.
From Text Readers to Hypertext Users
The quantum leap from linear traditional text to hypertext has a series of far-reaching consequences related to hypertext’s multilinear, multiauthored, and multimodal character.
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As a first consequence, it should be mentioned that one can no longer use the word readers to refer to the persons interacting with the hypertext. The readers have become active users because they use the hypertextual means in order to create pathways for building knowledge and to build new knowledge.
On the one hand, when hypertext designers provide the same piece of information embedded in content chunks existing in multiple contexts, they also provide multiple ways of changing and expanding the ways in which that piece of information can be understood by users. In this way, the users are rewriting the hypertext each time they access it in a different way because they are establishing new meaning-making connections among content chunks. The chosen trajectories of the pathways reflect the needs and purposes of these (inter)active users. Clearly, trajectories are also influenced if not monitored by the structural affordances provided by the designers who have functionally and hierarchically classified pieces of information. On the other hand, the users of hypertext can also build knowledge by designing their own hypertext when editing or adding (networks of) links or content chunks to an existing hypertext. These collaborative activities across multiple trajectories can be both synchronous and asynchronous. The outcome might be rewarding if it contributes to knowledge enhancement, but it can also be detrimental if the additions distort the existing body of knowledge and damage its primary communicative purposes. In this situation, new questions for assessing expertise, credibility, and responsibility are bound to appear.
These empowering opportunities provoke an unprecedented blurring of boundaries between them and the hypertext’s designers as far as authorship is concerned. The networking and collaboration activities that can take place when accessing and designing hypertext are also able to give birth to heterogeneous communities dispersed across geopolitical, cultural, and social borders too. The degree of interactivity and extent of collaboration of these virtual communities can vary in relation to contexts and communicative purposes. However, these empowering opportunities may become problematic when issues related to the traditional protection of copyright and intellectual property come into focus. This pressing dilemma is still to be solved.
In connection with the previously mentioned change of status as far as authorship is concerned, another repercussion, namely the issue of literacy enhancement, has to be considered too. It is no longer possible to talk only about traditional literacy because, in order to manage various communication systems of the contemporary knowledge-based society, people need to acquire a range of literacies. The hypertext user is now acknowledged as a multiliterate user who can understand, respond to, and build knowledge across several overlapping and mixing communicative modes including verbal (i.e., written text and speech), visual (i.e., still and moving images), and aural (i.e., sounds and music). This contemporary multiliterate user thus has the competency of understanding and strategically employing the multimodal interactions of these modes to create meaning in the context of hypermedia. Being multiliterate also implies that the contemporary hypertext and hypermedia user is endowed with a capacity of discernment regarding which semiotic modes can be most efficiently employed to carry a specific communicative load. This discernment implies that the multiliterate user can also stretch and even modify the distinct and conventional possibilities of each mode and of their orchestration to communicate meaning.
Although the concept of multiliteracy can be considered as incorporating digital literacy too, in the context of this discussion, it should be mentioned separately because a hypertext user needs first of all digital skills in order to manage multimodal ensembles in hypermedia context. Digital literacy entails complex abilities to deal with the flexible hypermodal tools of communication and the capacity to constantly update these abilities. Consequently, a lack of expertise in employing efficiently the multimodal and digital tools of communication in hypermedial context can lessen the expected impact of a hypertext.
From Reading to Navigating
Another consequence of the transition from text to hypertext is related to the fact that the action performed by a user interacting with hypertext can no longer be labeled as simple reading but as hyperreading or navigating. Users navigate because hypertexts enable them to choose and (re)adjust their own pathways, while exploring content chunks and mentally mapping their movements across the nonlinear and manifold structures in the environment of hypermedia. Online browsing is an obvious example of this new type of accessing hypermedia. The personalized navigation activity is so fundamental to defining hypermedia context that researchers have also labeled hypertext as a specific user-made pathway along which trans-generic, trans-institutional, and trans-situational meanings are constructed.
The downside of this navigating freedom is related to the increased tendency of hypertext users toward just surfing smaller and smaller content chunks in order to rapidly and uncritically access bits of information. For example, when reading online newspapers, people tend to read by headline and interest rather than read linearly page to page. When surfing at high speed, the decisions to access or finish longer text chunks and to ponder what is included and excluded through various linking strategies can be avoided. Similarly, the meaning-making associations provided by the available electronic links do not need to be critically questioned either. In such situations, the cognitive steps to be taken from simple information to complex knowledge seem no longer to be encouraged by designers or expected by users. Obviously, the users can also opt for surfing’s rapid digressions due to the overwhelming and disorienting number of choices that they are confronted with when accessing a hypertext. This excessiveness can hinder critical knowledge building because of the sheer amount of information that can be accessed simultaneously at any time.
The adaptive hypermedia is considered to be a solution to this problem in certain areas (e.g., in education, entertainment, or advertising) as it is supposed to selectively offer the users the presentation and navigation support that is most appropriate to their needs, preferences, and characteristics. The appropriateness of that support is measured according to the user type and/or previous search behavior. However, this predictive analysis of users and the subsequent set of options that they are presented with may hinder certain categories of users from making the effort to navigate beyond the proposed boundaries and explore hypertexts existing on other pathways. In the long run, other disruptive implications may appear. For example, it can also gradually affect dialogue participation as it can prevent users from actively contributing comments or other content chunks beyond the domains of interests established beforehand. Undoubtedly, fair access to information and dialogue participation in hypermedia context can also be hindered in some countries by sheer forms of censorship or surveillance that have nothing to do with adaptive media.
Such adverse implications might threaten to deteriorate the democratic essence of hypertext and hypermedia, namely, the multilinear access to manifold information and the subsequent possibility of collaborative knowledge building across any kinds of boundaries and borders.
Researchers will need to reassess continually both the gains and the losses related to new developments of hypertext and hypermedia in order to keep pace with and respond to the continuous, daunting, and all-encompassing changes of the communications landscape.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.