| TO PROVE the
assertion "We think space, therefore it is," Tolva’s essay analyzes a specialized
hypertext called the mola
web as a way of discussing the "space, contour and depth" of hypertext.
And he asks: how do we account for the undeniable sense that we are navigating
some kind of space when we are reading hypertext? The mola web is a collection
of hypertext where everything is linked; nothing lies outside of the web
and therefore "surface equals depth," and is presented as an example of
hypertext taken to its logical extreme. For Tolva, the search for the "natural
sign" or a symbol so transparent that it is indistinguishable from reality
is most easily recognized in the current cultural craze for virtual realities
and other hyperreal forms of delusion. The experience of working with the
mola web is likened to the "dog-earing" of a book: the color changes of
the followed hypertext links imitate the dog-earing of a book's pages as
a record of temporal reading progress. In the hypertext web, the shifting
ratio of one color to the other plots the amount of the web that the reader
has encountered. "As the reader moves around the web, the visited link
color scheme seems to bubble to the surface, subsuming its counterpart."
Tolva’s analysis of the mola web demonstrates text that partiticpates fully
in a spatio-temporal dialectic: the links and words not only describe a
quilt (mola), the web literally evokes one. According to Tolva, rather
than disrupting the concept of spatial form (as some critics have argued),
links generate it. Thwarting temporal flow, they open a space for the reader's
mind to construct the extra dimension needed to rationize the act of "traveling"
a link in a Euclidean universe that physically, logically disallows it.
(Jean
Jacobson.) |