It’s all hyper to me.

The idea that everything is “hyper” is quite prevalent in these texts, and an interesting one for me to ponder. As I type away right now, it is to be noted that this is going to be a decently long text that will only be available on screen (it’s a hypertext, if you will). It is also to be noted that I have taken all three of the readings for this evening and printed them out, for who wants to read a cumulative 27 pages on an entirely non-interactive pdf when, as a reader, I need to be highlighting and making notes on the texts in order to write my own hypertext on the readings about hypertexts? What an odd predicament, right?

Sosnoski remarks that most people feel an aversion to reading long texts on-screen, yet everything in the world seems to be quickly moving from paper to screen as the main medium. Hayles is in agreement on this. As technology continues to advance, the prevalence of on-screen reading increases more and more. In fact, most of us wouldn’t even think of some of our digital reading as reading because we encounter it so frequently that it doesn’t feel like an oddity anymore. We scan Facebook and Twitter, we read Cosmo articles online, we do our research for our classes on websites like JSTOR and the MSU Library Website. In classes such as this one, we read each other’s blog posts and write responses, both of which we do online. Our world is quickly moving toward (if it hasn’t already reached) an entirely digital reading environment. We are so desensitized to onscreen reading that it almost feels second nature to us, yet when it comes to texts longer than 4, maybe 5, pages, we feel more inclined to read the text in print. This is an interesting way for me to start a discussion on hyper-reading and hypertext.

Sosnoski also states that “future advances in technology are likely to bring us pocket computers with the look and feel of books and to provide for us not only the text but also loads of complementary materials” (161). What’s the most mind-boggling thing about this statement is the reality of it. We have Nooks, Kindles, iPads, and other forms of “pocket computers” on which we can not only keep electronic copies of books but also easily access any sort of complementary material we may need. It is amazing that while the world seems to be pushing more and more toward technology, and advancing further and further into the hyper world, we readers resist the urge to accept and use the technology at our fingertips. We literally have ways of holding hundreds of thousands of pages of texts in our hands and at the swipe of a finger we can view a whole new text in a matter of seconds. We have the capability of accessing all of these texts and their supplementary materials at the blink of an eye, and yet we resist this movement (or at least I resist it). My internship, editing novels for a small Bozeman-based publishing company, is entirely comprised of editing and reading work done from my computer screen, and regularly I am tempted to print the manuscript out for myself, edit it, and then type in my changes. Unfortunately, I know that this would make the process far lengthier than it needs to be, so I do all of the work digitally. Yet I cannot help but feel that ever-present tug to take the hyper out of the text and make it print. I can appreciate the advances in technology, and I can accept the convenience of being able to hold all of my necessary texts on one small tablet, yet I cannot bring myself to convert to a full-blown user of hypertext. For me, nothing will beat having paper and a pen in my hands and really getting at the text—hands on.

Additionally, Sosnoski essentially calls us lazy readers. This, I could not agree with more. Due to the vast accessibility of hypertexts we readers have become prone to hyper-reading which is essentially characterized by filtering and skimming. Instead of doing a detailed and close reading of the text, we mentally break the texts down and search for the things that we find useful. I’m not even going to attempt to lie and tell you that I am not guilty of this. I am. In fact, if you’ve mystically convinced yourself that you are not a hyper reader—you are lying to yourself. As someone who has mass amounts of reading each night, I think there is no way I would get through all of them without hyper-reading on occasion. And honestly, if a text doesn’t interest or intrigue me, of course I am going to be prone to hyper-reading it. But I think that this is all a part of the hypertext conversation. With text literally at our fingertips, are we more inclined to hyper-read? I think yes. And are we really giving the texts that we are reading the respect that they deserve when we hyper-read them? No, I don’t think we are.