STRATEGIES FOR READING DIGITAL TEXTS

Abstract

This study focuses on hypertext, which arranges knowledge into a non-linear, spatial, net-like system instead of the traditional linear, textual one, because the former better reflects cognitive human thinking. As Barthes’ writerly text manifests itself, the emphasis shifts from author–work–tradition onto text–discourse–culture. Hypertext appears mainly in narrative genres, since disrupting or relativizing the linear order makes most sense in exactly these text types. When we speak of real hypertext, there is not a single story but there are different ways of reading instead. This kind of reading has nothing to do with the traditional idea of a work being ”an authorized, final product”: by way of hyperjumps, the reader becomes a scriptor, taking an active part in producing the text. The study systematizes hypertexts based not only on their formal-structural features but also based on the ways of reading and differentiating between two kinds of reading: those enabling or preventing concept-formation, due to the presence or absence of orientational skills. Digital texts enable the reader to become a scriptor, i.e. to immediately use, supplement and modify the text. Consequently, in the era of electronic-digital media, teaching reading cannot just be showing how to interpret alphabetical writing. The paper maps the various reading strategies used in electronic media, linking the concept of concentric circles reading strategy to hypertext, and calls attention to the phenomenon that digital reading is shifting from searching and interpreting meaning hidden in texts towards free associations.