Asides on Hypertext
By Michael Swaine
One site I often visit tends to put all the information it has about a topic right there on its front page. Far from being pleased at the convenience, I find myself clicking in frustration on random words, looking for the depth.
The curious thing is that I'm pretty sure my frustration could be assuaged without the site having to add any more information, just by moving the details on any given topic to another page.
One seeks that second dimension.
Narrative has been and probably will remain unidimensional, but most prose is more than narrative, and its extra dimension pushes against the walls, trying to get out.
Actually it's probably not a full dimension, but some fractal. Not every point on a line of running text can or should be projected off at a right angle. Although—thinking about that a bit further—from any point in a narrative it's often possible to branch off in several directions, so maybe the proper topological model is a fractal bite out of a multidimensional space. Not a continuous surface in any dimension, but discrete paths through hyperspace. Or…
I'm musing on prose here, by the way. There's no lack of truly 2D content on the Web, most of it making a visual argument for more flesh tones in the Web-safe color palette.
If I were to mention at this point the fact that Sports Illustrated has not only spun off an online version of its swimsuit issue but has this year gone to VR and 3D, I might lose a few, mostly male, readers between this paragraph and the next.
And if I were to mention that fact, it would be another example of prose trying to break out of the constraints of its unidimensional form.
