Patches

I had some good reading time this week, so I did some more snooping around Connected. I noticed that Jackson's "Stitch Bitch" has a similar patchwork feel, as well as having "patchwork" in the title. I've noticed that my tolerance for reading in this style is much higher than normal. I can blow through like 20 pages of Connected without batting an eye. The hypertext style seems to resonate with my contemporary attention-span.
Jackson goes through chunks of difference between her life and the life of her alter-ego in hyperspace. She lists differences between life, fiction and hypertext (and hyper-fiction). Organized into little bursts of a concept, with an example from pop culture, and perhaps a dash of hermeneutics. I like when she admits her disdain for the term "hypertext" calling it a "spiky" word, that reminds her of a rooster on a go-cart (uhhh ok whatever you say Shelley Jackson). This kind of interpretation , as she puts it, "leaves you naked with yourself at every leap." When hypertexting the frequent interruptions give the interaction with the discourse more of a dialogged feel. The style is similar to Shaviro's. Perhaps they are innovators in a new academic style that is more readable for this hypertextual readers.
The "schizophrenia" and uncertain path of doing online research, as opposed to book research, has been transformed into "book" or article reading, as best as it can be. In these cases it is to provide an example, but what if we started doing all sorts of research this way? When I am looking for information on a film I am studying I start at the IMDB, but could wind up anywhere, from a page about the director, to one about a film that influenced the film makers that will help me better understand what I am writing about.
In boiling down Christianity to e-vangelism to e-vangelism 2.0 to Jesuit's combating SL immorality with e-vangelism. I used hypertext hopping to understand what was popular, pertinent and researchable. The internet, being a populist medium gives wandering an advantage over calculation. Had I known what I wanted to study when I began, I might have gotten stuck with a topic that was a dead-end. Hypertext keeps our eyes and minds open, if a bit unfocused.