Some time passes, and you suddenly appear in our control room. You look knowingly at us and say "I have climbed the tree of links and followed your discussion. You both share an illusion."
What are you doing here and what is that illusion you think we share?
"My presence here shatters that illusion, which is that there are meta-levels safely above or surrounding a story."
But we have been trying to show that some kinds of meta-stories are necessarily linked to the telling of any story.
"Yes, you have, and you are right. But you are still presuming the separation of levels. In hypertext, links can work both ways. I followed a link backwards and found you. Now your control room is part of the story, which has expanded to surround your comments."
He is saying that while a hypertext can model a superior/inferior meta-level discussion, the separations are just artifacts of the linking patterns. There is no secure and separate meta-platform.
But wait, isn't that what we have been asserting, that any control room always has another level, another story tacitly above or behind it? Especially in hypertext, because all the attention to linking and authoring and readerly experience means there will be background tacit meta-stories guiding the writing and reading. In that sense there's always more to say, and no final meta-view.
No, he's saying more than we were; he is saying the levels do not stay distinct. Ordinary language and its stories surround and infiltrate the formal/technical separations.
"It is one thing to say you can't make everything explicit. But it's another thing to say (or do) how links cross barriers; doors open in walls. Links both separate and unite. Levels can haunt each other."
That larger unity refuses any neat label but it is more like a story than a formal discussion.
I see, and that mixing and haunting shows a difference between hypertext narrative and the unplotted patterns created by informational web links among self-contained mini-essays. Hypertext narrative is one place on the web where some of the old hypertext ideals still resist the pressure of informational hypertext.
Since the levels cross, let's adjourn to the room with the books on narrative theory and the comfortable chairs.
Some time passes, and you suddenly appear in our control room. You look knowingly at us and say "I have climbed the tree of links and followed your discussion. You both share an illusion."
What are you doing here and what is that illusion you think we share?
"My presence here shatters that illusion, which is that there are meta-levels safely above or surrounding a story."
But we have been trying to show that some kinds of meta-stories are necessarily linked to the telling of any story.
"Yes, you have, and you are right. But you are still presuming the separation of levels. In hypertext, links can work both ways. I followed a link backwards and found you. Now your control room is part of the story, which has expanded to surround your comments."
He is saying that while a hypertext can model a superior/inferior meta-level discussion, the separations are just artifacts of the linking patterns. There is no secure and separate meta-platform.
But wait, isn't that what we have been asserting, that any control room always has another level, another story tacitly above or behind it? Especially in hypertext, because all the attention to linking and authoring and readerly experience means there will be background tacit meta-stories guiding the writing and reading. In that sense there's always more to say, and no final meta-view.
No, he's saying more than we were; he is saying the levels do not stay distinct. Ordinary language and its stories surround and infiltrate the formal/technical separations.
"It is one thing to say you can't make everything explicit. But it's another thing to say (or do) how links cross barriers; doors open in walls. Links both separate and unite. Levels can haunt each other."
That larger unity refuses any neat label but it is more like a story than a formal discussion.
I see, and that mixing and haunting shows a difference between hypertext narrative and the unplotted patterns created by informational web links among self-contained mini-essays. Hypertext narrative is one place on the web where some of the old hypertext ideals still resist the pressure of informational hypertext.
Since the levels cross, let's adjourn to the room with the books on narrative theory and the comfortable chairs.