Interactivity

Physical interactivity is found in print texts like Cortazar’s Hopscotch, though many postmodern texts employ readers to interact with the text, through elements like fragmentation, ambiguity, and intertextuality. All texts, and art for that matter, can be said to be interactive, as they require a viewer/reader and the reader always brings prior experience to the experience, but interactivity is heightened in postmodern texts and electronic mediums.

Interactivity persists in an electronic medium. Landow says, “The particular importance of networked textuality—that is, textuality written, stored, and read on a computer network—appears when technology transforms readers into reader-authors or ‘wreaders’” (14).  Like postmodern texts that work to blur the boundary between reader and author with metafiction and fragmentation, electronic texts work to close the gap of subjective experience even further, by bringing the (w)reader into the frame, changing the narrative as she or he makes navigational decisions, gleaning meaning from the movement of the mouse. This is explicit in both hypertexts like afternoon and Patchwork Girl and Flash-based poetry such as “dear e.e.” by Ingrid Ankerson and Lori Janis and “Cruising” by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar. In these “poems that go,” the navigation creates message and metaphor; the meaning comes from the scrolling of the mouse to catch pieces of a dream or navigate a car while cruising. When we become participants in the experience of reading, we enter into a relationship with the author and the text, making decisions and choices, inferring meaning, and making connections. As Ted Nelson says: “But this means you, dear reader, must develop the fantic imagination. You must learn to visualize possible uses of computer screens, so you can get on down to the deeper level of how we’re going to tie these things together” (326).