This past week in ENGL 460 we have been learning about Hypertext, something that we have all heard of and use often but have probably never thought about in depth. At least I hadn’t before this lesson. Hypertext is the internet rabbit hole that we have all wondered down at one point in time. Dr. Pilsch explains it perfectly in the weekly reading– “it is the process of going to Wikipedia to find information on a topic, clicking a link to another article and realizing, often an hour or more later, that you have no idea why you are reading an encyclopedia article about pineapples.” As a frequent internet browser who finds themselves in these internet black holes often, I find hypertext extremely valuable to the experience of the internet, and after reading my classmate’s blog posts, I found they produced many constructive points about the topic.

One function of hypertext that many people talked about in their post, including me, was how convenient hypertext is by relieving the information overload that would ensue for readers if it did not exist. Think about Wikipedia, for example. A single article could go on for thousands of scrolls without hypertext. If you go to the site and find any article, think about every time you see a hyperlink, imagine it not being there. Picture it is going on about the new topic that is introduced and imagine if every link did that. Geez, I would never go on the internet (that is a bit dramatic, but you see what I mean.) Thank God for Bush and Nelson for coming up with a better way to organize information over the internet!

This lesson took a fun turn, and we got to play games for our weekly activity. These games were all interactive games or fiction that utilized hypertext to tell a story. One of my classmates, Taylor, and I chose the same game: Depression Quest. The game was a bit, well, depressing, but it was also interesting and entertaining. The game basically went like this– you play a character who is depressed, and it gives you various scenarios in which the character’s depression is manifesting. For each scenario, the player gets to choose their reaction to the situation that has happened. The choices that the player makes changes the story and leads to a different outcome every time the game is played. The point of the game is to teach people about depression and what having the illness is like. Taylor made an excellent point in her blog post: If this game was in another format, it would not have been as effective in its purpose. I completely agree. If this game was a book or a regular game, it would have been a snooze fest. She says that Depression Quest allowed the player to become more invested in the life of the character because of the format. By reading through these situations and having to decide what happens next as if it is happening to you makes you feel more connected to the story. I think this game did a great job and was the best method of sharing its message.

Brooke poses some interesting questions in her blog post. She brings up Bush’s views of science and technology moving towards destruction. She questions how Bush would feel about the internet’s current methods of data collection, and I wonder about this as well. Would he think that apps such as Instagram and Twitter having specific ads appear on user’s dashboards based on their searches is an invasion of privacy? What about when you have a conversation with a friend about your favorite ice cream, and the next week you randomly begin to see ads for that ice cream on all of your social media sites? Would he view this as corruption? I can’t say exactly how he would fee, but I think it would be weary of the current state if the internet and technology. Considering that Bush essentially predicted how we use the internet today; it would be interesting to hear his thoughts!

This week’s lesson was refreshing and fun, and I think most of my classmates would agree. I am thinking about incorporating some of the topics we learned about into my final project.