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   ###     ###   ##   ###   ##  #   ###   #   Interpersonal Computing and
   ###     ###   ##   ###   ##      ###               Technology:
   ###     ###   ##   ###           ###        An Electronic Journal for
   ###     ########   ###           ###            the 21st Century
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   ###     ###        ###   ##      ###             ISSN: 1064-4326
   ###     ###        ###   ##      ###               April 1996
 #######   ###        ########      ###     Volume 4, Number 2, pp. 7-26
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               Published by the Department of Education
               University of Maryland Baltimore County
            Additional support provided by Georgetown University

             This article is archived as GIBSON IPCTV4N2 on
                   LISTSERV@LISTSERV.GEORGETOWN.EDU
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+ Page 7 +

IS ALL COHERENCE GONE?  THE ROLE OF NARRATIVE IN WEB DESIGN

Stephanie Gibson,
University of Baltimore, MD

INTRODUCTION

This article offers some thoughts about how our new techniques
and technologies --  specifically hypertextual writing and the
World Wide Web -- veer away from characteristics embedded in
print.  It begins with a selective examination of narrative: How
it finds a home in culture and in academia, and what it becomes
in the hands of technology other than print. The literature of
hypermedia provides a helpful framework for examining the
rhetorical and symbolic implications of the World Wide Web.
Fissures between print narrative and World Wide Web narrative
exhibit how coherence is negotiated and understood in these two
media.  Characteristics unique to the World Wide Web will inform
a narrative coherence which values qualities different from those
currently found in the linear world of print.  Web coherence will
in part be anchored in associative, linked structures.  Some
suggestions and questions about the direction of rhetorical
structure for the World Wide Web are posed.

IS ALL COHERENCE GONE?

What is coherence, anyway?  It is the glue that holds what we
perceive to be external reality together in such a way that we
can make sense of it.  For some time now narrative has been the
glue holding most of the world in place.  Without narrative it
would be impossible to make sense of much of what we see in our
world.  Few events would make sense were they not linked to other
events in some meaningful way.  One night while attending the
opera a friend of mine saw a man dressed as an artichoke.  By the
time I  heard the story it was indeed that -- a story.  My friend
had constructed a narrative explaining both why the man was so
elaborately costumed and why, so dressed, he was attending the
Metropolitan Opera.  Had my friend investigated he would have
learned a different story, but still a story, for narrative is
how we explain the world to ourselves.

In the years since print has come to dominate (particularly
Western)  culture so strongly, habits associated with print --
habits like linear construction and sequentiality, and the
expectations that the material will remain static and uniform --
have become firmly embedded in our unconscious awareness.
Obviously narrative does not grow from print.  Powerful examples
of pre-print narrative, like the Old Testament and the Iliad,
remain with us to this day.  Anchoring narrative in the linear,
however, IS a feature of the print world.  Print is fixed upon
the page  and no matter how often a reader jumps from one page to
another the text remains in the same order.  Both Eric Havelock
and Walter Ong point out that print values and privileges

+ Page 8 +

particular characteristics: linearity, sequentiality, certain
orderly types of relationships among the parts of the narrative
and between the narrative and the world outside the narrative.
Recent technological and social movement calls these values  into
question.  This challenge casts a bright light and in this moment
of illumination it is possible to examine what is taking place.

After the Internet has saturated the cultural landscape people
will construct their world views with different tools.  In this
examination of narrative, coherence, print and hypertext, I hope
only to open a few doors, pose some questions, and point out a
few interesting differences.  All this before the Web becomes
such second nature that, like print, we hardly notice the immense
paradigm it drags along with it.

The Story of How We Got Here

Although the occasional writer, James Joyce for instance, steps
outside the format of linear narrative this breaking of the frame
only further validates linear narrative as the default form for
coherence simply by drawing attention to what happens when the
form is violated.  Narrative is not simply the landscape of
literature.  Although this is where we are consciously most
accustomed to experiencing it, it informs the paradigm of all of
Western thought.  We understand the world by telling ourselves,
and others, stories about it.  When we seek to understand the
meaning of an event, our most effective way of doing so is to
place it within a context of related events, telling ourselves a
narrative which explains how the event takes on meaning for us.

Sometimes the story can be quite complex.  The main point of a
trial, for instance, in this country is to create for the jury
(or judge) a sense of the narrative surrounding the event in
question.  This will provide meaning for the crime and give the
jury a way of understanding what happened.  In  court each side
wants you to accept the story they construct.  When we compose
resumes, we want to communicate to their readers a story about
ourselves.  In this story we are the main character and we have
progressed through life, meeting and surmounting progressively
more difficult challenges.

Narrative is central in a wide variety of disciplines.  A
narrative is used to contextualize, for example, the story that
biologists tell about evolution.  That it is not the only story
is clear from the existence of debate.  In its simplest
incarnation the story of evolution has humans descending from the
apes -- implying to some a direct linear connection.
In fact, it appears that those objecting to the theory of
evolution do so because of the linearity they perceive in the
development of the tale. Psychology has developed a theory of
narrative analysis.  In this method, people are urged to recreate
the stories of their lives in ways that will help them understand

+ Page 9 +

how they came to develop their current attitudes (O'Hanlon,
1995).  Historians devote much energy to discussing how
narratives about history are negotiated.  The first duty of the
historian, says Barbara Tuchman, (1981), is to

. . . do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the
information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard
the irrelevant . . . and put the rest together so that it
forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has
been said, is the lifeblood of history.  (pp. 17-18)

Literature, of course, makes explicit its relationship with
narrative as a mode of analysis.  And in the broad field of
communications the structure of linear narrative drives theories
of both interpersonal communication and media studies (Fisher
1985; Lucaites & Condit, 1985).  That is to say that the
interpretation of both media content and the way we relate to
others is understood in terms of narrative construct.  For
instance, in their landmark book on the pragmatics of
communication Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson (1967) discuss how
each member of a communication situation constructs the event's
story and how these constructions may differ from person to
person.  Fiske and Hartley (1978), in another anchor text on
understanding television, also discuss how television is
contextualized as a cultural storyteller.

The characteristics of narrative have informed the content of the
dominant media of this culture for some time.  After a brief
initial period during which the limits of the technology were
being tested, film rapidly became a story telling medium.  The
same was true of much of early radio. Television, of course, has
taken the narrative form to new heights (some might say depths)
with soap operas, situation comedies, and dramas.  Even program
formats not immediately perceived as narrative demonstrate our
cultural need to contextualize reality in this manner.  Both talk
shows and news shows are popular according to how interesting
they are able to make the stories they tell.  Before these
electric media were our primary source of entertainment,
traditional print was our constant narrative companion.  Linear
narrative form structures most of the important institutions in
this culture, from politics and religion to education and
commerce.

These are all examples of narrative in its highly linear
structure.  Linearity and sequentiality, characteristics
associated with print force, or request, an audience to attend in
a particular way.  Non-linear possibilities crack open the
relationship between user and text.  Culturally familiar
narrative at this point is linear.  All narrative, however, does
not unfold in this way.  Recent trends show narrative taking on a
distinctly non-linear shape.

+ Page 10 +

The Breakdown of Linearity

Kaplan (1996) and Feinstein (1996) have shown that, in times
before the printing press made the linearity and sequentiality of
print the norm, authors invited a different engagement from their
audience.  Feinstein (1996) maintains that Chaucer _intended_ his
audience to rearrange the various Canterbury Tales, thus making
the sequencing of the story far less significant than in present
print.  Kaplan (1996) discusses Blake's problems with mixing
print and images.  She suggests that when the responsibility for
incorporating print and pictures on a page belonged to one
person, the two forms were far more integrated than when
exigencies of the press forced them into segregated, linearly
constructed, spaces.  Recent history shows several examples of
attempts at non-linearity in literature.  James Joyce's
"Ulysses", Jorge Luis Borges's "Garden of Forking Paths,"
Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" and Alice Walker's "Temple
of My Familiar" -- to name only a few -- are all works not driven
by linearity.  Of late, more and more pieces appearing in
traditional media have been structured in severely nonlinear
format.  In other, more modern, media examples abound of
non-linear, but still strong, narrative.  In addition to
literature, the non-linear roots of electronic media can be seen
in both film and television -- the contemporary predecessors of
digital communication.

Film has always had a strong relationship with linear narrative.
From the first it seemed a form made for story telling.  Film, in
fact, makes it even more difficult than print for audiences to
effect the sequence of what is experienced.  In spite of the
possibilities for time shifting and the contributions of other
elements (sound, visual effects) in film the presentation remains
fixed and the viewing experience is linear.  Recently, however,
(conventional flashback sequences notwithstanding) many film
makers have offered up works which break traditional narrative
frames.

"Natural Born Killers," a 1994 film that reveled in the publicity
of its violence, was an interestingly nonlinear film.  As a film
which sought to make explicit the umooredness caused by the
breakdown of traditionally narrative institutions like family,
television, and the criminal justice system, it was an example of
itself.  The film was an unmoored, brutally fractured narrative
about an unmoored, brutally fractured society.  This impression
is received as much through the content -- the screenplay's
dialogue and story line -- as through the aesthetic techniques
used in making the film.  By using techniques like combining film
and video, rapid cutting, and breaking the frame of traditional
linearly sequential time, the film forces its audience to
experience (and examine) the culture it maintains creates the
sort of people it depicts.  More recently Oliver Stone's latest
opus, "Nixon," also disrupts the linear format while maintaining

+ Page 11 +

a strong narrative sense.  Stone combines the grainy black and
white associated with hidden camera and documentary with both
traditional linear cinematic techniques and special effects to
construct a layered, as opposed to, linear narrative.

Although MTV is a popular example of the breakdown of traditional
linear narrative form, the fractured linearity of television did
not begin with MTV.  It is true that many MTV videos use
different production techniques from those we are accustomed to
in  traditional television, a majority of them, however, are
anchored in structure of linear narrative.  When MTV first became
popular in the early 1980s many of my students leveled the
criticism that music videos were embracing the narrative form at
the expense of imagination, maintaining that some pieces created
a story where none existed in the song, thereby stifling the
possibilities of other, listener generated, ideas about the song.
At this first indication of novelty, although they loved the
music and were mesmerized by the videos, these people in their
late teens and early twenties were already expressing the
discomfort that accompanies change.

Beyond MTV, television does not require the same linearity that
print demands.  Linearity is integral to print-- readers read
first one word, then the next and so on until they have read a
sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book.  Although most readers
do tend to jump around within a text to a certain extent, a
definite sense of sequentiality must be preserved to participate
in the activity of reading.  The requirements of the television
technology and the conditions of attendance are quite different.
Viewers can channel surf, perform other tasks, even watch two
programs at once on some televisions -- all this, and we have not
even considered the possibilities opened up by VCR-assisted
viewing.

American television has, in fact, always had a tenuous
relationship with linear narrative.  The linearity of narrative
television has always been interrupted by commercials.  It is a
constantly branching version of storytelling, beginning one
place, going elsewhere, returning to the original string later,
and repeating this pattern ad infinitum.  The "elsewhere" is a
totally unrelated elsewhere: From Murphy Brown's Studio, for
instance, to a Man getting "Zestfully Clean."  They are not part
of the same story (at least not on the surface).  Several
contemporary television shows break the production rules
associated with narrative form on television.  Although "Hill
Street Blues" may have pioneered the hand-held camcorder style of
shooting, other shows have taken this early single effect and
added to it layers of self consciousness. "Miami Vice" was an
early example, but shows like "Homicide: Life in the Streets" and
"NYPD Blue" have regularized them in the medium.  Viewers see the
picture through a camera that, for instance, views a scene
swinging rapidly from left to right (moving far too swiftly to be

+ Page 12 +

called a" pan"), views the same subject from several different
positions in quick succession, or views the subject from an
unusual angle, with extreme graininess that calls attention to
the form.  The newest entry in the daytime soap race, "The City,"
is being touted for its new frame-breaking videographic
techniques.

Script writing for television begins to reflect this odd self
consciousness of the camera.  "Courthouse," a show that had a
brief life in the fall of 1995 had very little narrative line,
rather it was built primarily on the relationships of the
characters to one another.  The show's creator, Deborah Joy
LeVine  is quoted in "TV Guide" (1992) about her latest creation
calling it "faster-paced, sexier, hipper . . . than 'PrimeTime
Live' and 'Law & Order'" (p. 50).  None of these qualities
indicate thoughtful, or even sloppy, narrative. (p. 1)   The
premise of the show is the lives of the people involved in the
justice system, with the courthouse as the backdrop.  It is a
soap opera, but does not function as daytime serials usually do.
There were no stories, only vignettes, no consistent
characterizations, only people in interesting clothes.  Daytime
soaps build narratives about relationships by engaging the
characters in dialogue.  "Courthouse" had no expository dialogue.
The audience did not follow a story from beginning to end.
Instead the show presented snippets of interactions and the
audience was expected to assemble the narrative at home.
"Courthouse" showed the characters in their various milieus,
having quick conversations with one another about anything the
character happens to be involved in at the moment, and moving
swiftly on to the next character and next milieu.  In this
approach, the storyline is backgrounded against these
relationship tableaus.  After watching the show for an hour one
had the feeling that their time had just been spent channel
surfing.

The engagement invited by these shows is vastly different from
earlier programs.  The technology and the show's producers
conspire to have the television sit in the living room as a
resident storyteller.(2)  The new production techniques used give
us a sense of self consciousness on the part of the "television."
It -- the producers really -- is always aware that it is putting
on a show.  The construction of the story, then, becomes an
interactive collaboration between the storyteller and the
audience.  It is unavoidable that these composition and
production techniques have an impact on the structure of
narrative.  One effect is that relationships among characters
take on a much more central significance.  Another is that the
story teller (the television) becomes exceedingly self reflexive.
This means that the program is always aware that it is a
television show, and this forces the audience to take on a
different relationship with the narrative.  No longer is

+ Page 13 +

narrative neatly packaged; now some assembly is required.  The
audience takes on a vital interactive role in the construction of
meaning.  For explanations of how interactive technology
constructs narrative we can look to the relatively new phenomenon
of hypertext.

Hypertext and the Construction of the World Wide Web

John Slatin says simply that

. . . [t]he differences [between hypertext and more
traditional forms of text] are a function of technology, and
are so various, at once so minute and so vast, as to make
hypertext a new medium for thought and expression.
. . . A new medium involves both a new practice and a new
rhetoric, a new body of theory.  (p. 153).

Hypertext is non-linear -- frequently multimedia -- text where
the user has some amount of control over where she travels in the
text, and most discussions of hypertext cite non-linearity and
interactivity as two of its most significant characteristics.
The fragmentation of the text produces a totally different
structure.  Reading becomes an experimental experience
where author and reader must collaborate to assemble a meaningful
arrangement.  George Landow (1994) asserts that the rhetoric of
hypertext will be one of "arrivals and departures" since the
reader is always leaving one point and arriving at another.

[A]uthors of hypertext and hypermedia materials confront
three related problems: First, what must they do to orient
readers and help them read efficiently and with pleasure?
Second, how can they inform those reading a document where
the links in that document lead?  Third, how can they assist
readers who have just entered a new document to feel at home
there? Drawing upon the analogy of travel, we can say that
the first problem concerns "navigational" information. . . .
The second concerns "exit" or "departure" information and
the third "arrival" or "entrance" information.  (p. 84)

Considerable excitement has been generated about hypertext: It
came of age in the summer of 1993 when several were reviewed in
front page pieces in both the Washington Post and the New York
Times.  Just over two years later, by the close of 1995, the
World Wide Web was the most rapidly growing section of the
Internet and it is a giant -- literally world wide -- hypertext.
Although some differences exist, the literature of hypertext
also informs the rhetoric of the World Wide Web.

A web designer must build the site never knowing how the user
will arrive there, what pages a user might access and in what
order.  Readers may access a particular site having specifically
searched for it using one of several search engines; they may

+ Page 14 +

arrive there unexpectedly having activated a link at a completely
different Web site; they may know of the destination site only
though another page (in the same site or not) to which it is
linked; or they may have knowledge of a Web page they think is an
independent document even though it is embedded deeply within the
navigational structure of a complex Web site.

Links can be constructed without either the knowledge or consent
of the Web master of the destination page so access can originate
from unknown points.  Neither do Web builders know what pages of
a Web site users will choose to read.  Some users investigate a
site thoroughly, firing all links, carefully examining every page
of text, and following every possible connection.  But even when
users carefully and attentively peruse a Web site, depending on
the construction of the navigational structure, it is almost
always possible for readers to exit without having examined the
entire site.  And neither do Web builders have any control, or
even a way of knowing, in what order users will travel through
the pages.  There is no guarantee that users will enter at the
top page, and no way to prevent them from going directly to
any page buried deep within the structure. Methods for dealing
with these problems exist and the knowledgeable web site builder
understands three fundamentals about how to build an engaging web
site.

Navigation Plans
First, a navigation plan is frequently the first thing outlined
in designing a new site.  There are a number of different ways to
understand the linking structures of how a site might be
designed; Laura Lemay discusses a three different styles.  Sites
can be hierarchical, linear, linear with alternatives.
"Hierarchical" sites lead users through by placing few links on
each page so that users are forced to follow a reading order
predetermined by the builder.  "In a hierarchical organization it
is easy for readers to know their position in the structure;
choices are to move up for more general information, or down for
more specific information" (p. 32). Typically a button bank in a
linear construction might allow users to go on to another page,
return to the top page, or perhaps see a help or table of
contents page.

A linear site offers essentially no alternatives, leading
users through similarly to print.  Some Web sites combine linear
and hierarchical arrangements.  Other structures can follow a
sort of centipede model with a solid spine of description and
anchors which point to a large number of major offshoots which
contain the meat of the site.  Some sites use a web metaphor
wherein pages are linked to as many other pages in the site as
possible with no intended order.  Some sites use a nest metaphor
to locate the meat of the material at the center.

+ Page 15 +

Included Content
Second, a site builder must decide what needs to be included in
the site. Of course the purpose of the site will play a role
here: A strictly informational site such as a search engine can
be composed solely of nested lists while) a site such as
Discovery Channel On-line which embraces programming metaphor
contains a wealth of written text, graphics, animation, sound,
video, programs, bulletin board services, interactive
possibilities, and in the future even more.  A Web site can
consist of one or two to several hundred web pages and may
incorporate more than one navigational structure.  Some corporate
web sites (like Discovery Channel Online and ESPN Sportzone, for
example) are quite large.  Some, like the ESPN site and WIRED
Magazine Online, have gated access and a reader must be
a subscriber to wander through the entire web site; non
subscribers have only limited access.  Many sites provide users
more than one way of getting at the same information, and many
sites provide users more than one representation of what they
believe is the same content.  All this means intensive content
demands, new organizational requirements, and carefully planned
linking structures.

Site Design
Third, a site builder must decide, beyond a navigational
structure, on a method for assembling all of what is going into
the site -- a design.  In the universe of the World Wide Web<
pages design parameters involve different elements from other
symbolic forms.  Designers must consider things like how much
material (like large graphics) requiring time to load into the
client computer will be placed on each page, how will the page be

laid out, whether a page will consist of single computer screen
or be a scrolling field -- and if scrolling, how long -- and many
other design questions.

Collaboration among the entire authoring team is essential from a
site's inception since the number of options -- in design, in
navigational structure, in content, and in format -- is enormous.
Rapid developments in applications available for authoring web
pages increase the complexity of designing -- and programming--
for the Web. Interactivity and multimedia web options will only
multiply in the coming years.

How is a Web site Different from a Book?

Although web designers may see the entire site as a coherent
whole, it differs in several significant ways from the coherent
whole of a book (and from the coherent whole of a native stand
alone hypertext).  Where a book quite literally "covers" its
subject, web sites do no such thing.  Unless they are sought out,
web site boundaries are invisible to the user.  Moving beyond
them is a different activity from moving beyond the boundaries of
a book.  Only the URL at the top of the browser indicates that
the user has moved to a different server; books require putting
down and picking up with moving about frequently between the two.
Far from limiting what is included, as books inherently do, a web
site is expansive and inclusive.

+ Page 16 +

Nor is there a point at which the web site is "done" as they may
be constantly updated and revised at the desire of the web
master.  When a book is revised it must go back to press and be
published in an entirely new edition.  And, of course, the manner
in which one experiences a web site is not the traditional linear
way in which one interacts with print.  Even, perhaps especially,
in non-fiction print, linear narrative structure is an
important factor in how meaning is negotiated from the piece.

Partial analogies for this non-linearness can be found in the
world of print: Encyclopedia, magazines, anthologies.
Fundamental differences, however, exist between these structures
and Web sites.  Users of the World Wide Web demand that their
attention be engaged in a wide variety of ways (textually,
visually, informationally) in a way with which print simply
cannot compete.  Whether people were raised with it or not,
"Sesame Street" -- where letters danced with blue chickens --
taught America to demand that all information be equally
stimulating.  Magazines may approach this, but their medium
precludes so much of what the Web can offer.  The World
Wide Web offers instantaneous connections to relevant
information; magazines can only tell readers where to look.  The
Web offers the possibilities of continual alteration, print is
fixed.  At bottom, even though they may have interesting methods
of combining information, the forms mentioned above are still
print; their pages are numbered to indicate a suggested order of
consumption and they still embody the limitations of their
symbolic form.

The Web also differs significantly from stand alone native
hypertext. Stand alone hypertexts have boundaries, they cannot,
without some doing, be connected to other hypertexts.  Even
though they are simpler than print to revise and some allow
readers/users to participate in this way, they still require
re-release after emendations.  Web sites can be changed as easily
as one revises an in-progress word processed document.  And they
can be linked to any other web site absolutely anywhere in the
world without the permission -- or even consultation -- of the
builder of the destination page.  (3)

Unlike print or hypertext publication there is little gate
keeping on the Web.  Almost anyone can publish on the World Wide
Web -- all you need is an access to the Web and server space
where you are permitted to post your site.  The navigational
suggestions for hypertext frequently go unheeded in the Web
environment.  A chunk of time spent Web surfing reveals anything
from slick commercial sites which can be hundreds of pages deep
with an complex navigational structure to roughly done home pages
which consist mostly of written text and few or no links.

+ Page 17 +

Like hypertext and unlike traditional print, reading web pages is
not a linear process.  As in stand alone hypertext, one reads
screens of material which can consist of any combination of
printed text, graphic elements, animation, video, and sound
(although those elements later in this list are less likely with
present technological capabilities), with a navigational
foundation laid in under all these pieces that allows readers
numerous navigational options.

Another significant difference between the symbolic form of print
and that of the World Wide Web is the existence (print) or
non-existence (World Wide Web) of the artifact.  The absence of
an artifact results in seemingly flexible boundaries and an
inability to tell simply by looking how much information is
embodied in the site.  Many sites consist of more material
than would fit in the physical or coherent schemes of other
symbolic forms.

The discursive form of a magazine cannot contain video, nor does
its traditional layout provide any place for alternative
presentational forms. Clearly the structure of Web sites is not
linear.  But what it is, is not quite clear either.

A World Wide Web site can contain several approaches all at once.
A site that is rich at first glance and maintains a robust
appearance throughout does so by making as many navigational
choices as possible available on every page.  This precludes the
use of linear and hierarchical models, and insists on deeper,
more textured and imaginative linking structures.  With
many sections in every site, each consisting many different web
pages, keeping users engaged is of primary concern.  The types of
sites which seem to be the most engrossing are those where the
bulk of any individual piece (a richly woven story, an
interactivity, a chunk of information) is close to the surface,
not buried in a tangled sequence or even a straight line of
links.

At a seminar that outlined the programming for Discovery Channel
Online, Creative Director John Sanford reported that that which
is represented by the site builder as tangential will be treated
as such and not visited by most web users.  Even if an individual
section of a site appears shallow at first, it must swiftly
reveal its integral richness when the user chooses to pursue any
of the proffered links.  This often includes providing more than
one way to access the information.  This does not mean simply
more than one path in to the center of a single piece; it means
representing each individual piece in more than one way.  For
instance, an event can be reported in written text, and a photo
essay, and an animation, perhaps more, all telling (and
retelling) the same chunk of stuff.  This provides a written text
for those who enjoy reading and an animated text for those who
interact most profitably with pictures and dialogue.

+ Page 18 +

Just as in other media, form and content have an integral
relationship in the World Wide Web.  The representation of the
same material in several formats forces Web builders to think
about this relationship and decisions about either one cannot be
made independent of the other.  But in Web building the added
elements of the navigational plan and interactivity alter the
equations used to compose in other symbolic forms.  In fact,
frequently on the Web, form IS content: Movement through the site
(form) is the sole determinant of what the reader will understand
the site to be (content).  All these elements call into question
traditional notions of what constitutes coherence.  What
collection of information, in what organization, with what
linking structure, exhibiting what appearance makes a site take
on enough coherence that it may be called whole?  The World Wide
Web demonstrates that linearity is only one of many bones in the
skeleton supporting narrative coherence.

The New Coherence

World Wide Web coherence differs markedly from that of
traditional print. Print values linearity, sequentiality and the
existence of an artifact. Several qualities grow from these
characteristics. Cause and effect, a privileged reading style and
narrator, and concrete temporal and spatial boundaries and
relationships are among the qualities valued in traditional
print-based media. The World Wide Web, as well as certain types
of hypertext and other electronic encoding methods, value
different characteristics.

Instead of the cause and effect relationship implied by the
sequentiality of traditional print, the Web values relevant
connections among pieces of information. A good Web designer
understands what users will think about when experiencing a text
and will make those connections available. A relevant connection
is any additional text that any one particular text will make a
user want to see. It can vary widely and it can be a difficult
matter to anticipate. Providing for this can mean anything from
allowing a user to make her own alterations in a musical
composition at the site of a popular contemporary band to linking
criticism of written text to that text in a literary site to
permitting various types of interactive feedback. Anticipating
all these connections can produce web sites of rather large
dimensions. (4)

The World Wide Web also validates the idea that many paths can
lead to the same (or at least similar) destinations. It equalizes
many different ways of experiencing a text by providing separate
but equal, so to speak, ways into the same material. Web sites
with these qualities do not make judgments about which is
"better," they simply provide what they perceive to be equivalent
paths through the material. The implication is that the user
feels the manner she picks in which to "learn" is no less valid

+ Page 19 +

than any other manner. In this vision of the World Wide Web all
learning styles are valued equally. While educators may want to
hold tenaciously onto particular types of learning -- those
associated with printed text -- the World Wide Web is going to be
telling users that every way of experiencing and interacting with
information is equally valid. What has been said in the past
about hypertext holds true for the World Wide Web: Those in
traditional positions of authority will be required to relinquish
some measure of control.(5)

Just as the Web reconfigures privileges associated with symbolic
form, privileges of voice are also called into question.
Traditional print (non-fiction and fiction) privileged the voice
of the narrator or narrators. In print it is particularly
difficult for a single author to represent points of view not his
own in a positive -- or even neutral -- manner; such ideas arrive
filtered through his own worldview apparatus. Anthologies can set
opposing viewpoints side by side, but many obstacles will remain
to showing authentic disagreement. (6)  The Web offers an
alternative to this, as many voices can be harmonized in a single
hypertextual web site. No one viewpoint or voice is privileged as
each Web page is primary as it appears on the screen: no sequence
is implied, no voice is favored.

The format of traditional print provided audiences not only with
a voice but with an artifact, something to hold and read. The
World Wide Web provides no artifact, and the implications of this
are far reaching. Web text is unbounded. Since it exists solely
in cyberspace (no disks or resident programs or software) the
World Wide Web, perhaps more than any other electronic format,
arouses new perplexities. Not only does this quality have novel
temporal and spatial implications for symbolic form, but the
content of the text takes on an existence unimaginable with
print.

Stuart Moulthrop (1995) and Terrence Harpold (1996) examine the
fissuring of the text. Harpold maintains that the nature of
electronic text is to disappear, that those moments when cursors
freeze or screens go blank are integral to the digital universe.
Moulthrop discusses breakdowns within the text. It is no accident
that most metaphors for discussing problems with electronic text
reflect violent disruptions.  Moulthrop points out that much of
what goes on within hypertexts is characterized by decisive,
jarring, moments of impact. Hypertext is a "technology of trauma"
(p. 70).  Like Harpold, Moulthrop insists that "our technological
systems [are] fundamentally -- even _positively_ -- unreliable"
(p. 73). As a result traditional temporal and spatial boundaries
are fractured in electronic texts.

Harold Innis (1951) discussed the characteristics which bias a
technology toward time or space. Large, immovable objects (like
architecture) are time biased because they span time with little

+ Page 20 +

decay. Smaller, more portable objects (like books) are space
biased because they allow for easy dissemination. Electronic
media is not biased in either of these ways. Although it seems
simple to disseminate the Web -- given, as with broadcasting, the
proper technology -- it can, and will, at any moment refuse to
appear because a server is down, a connection is broken, or the
page is simply lost in a whimsical moment of refusal. Nor can it
be biased toward time because in an instant, for the same or
different reasons, it disappears. It disappears, too, from the
myriad new storage devices becoming available at record pace.
Magnetic media are fickle and data preservation is an illusion.
The rapid development of both software and hardware can make even
last year's compositions inaccessible. The implosion resulting
from the technology -- that there is neither artifact nor
temporal consistency -- disintegrates all boundaries. The World
Wide Web is ephemeral.

Previous media had more familiar methods of negotiating their
relationships with time and space. Television may come close to
the artifactless, non-linearity of the World Wide Web. On
television, however primitive it may seem to resolute channel
surfers, programs are designed (internally at least) for
consumption in a particular sequence. Most television shows and
many (usually the most successful) commercials are driven by
linear narrative structure. Viewers are not expected to watch the
last ten minutes of "Baywatch," then the first ten minutes, then
the fourth ten minutes, followed by the second and third ten.
Although sequentiality may seem irrelevant to some shows,
television writers still expect a certain degree of cooperation
from viewers when it comes to understanding not only plot
construction in a single episode but character development
throughout the life of a series. Traditional print, the artifact,
does not mutate, link to, evaporate before our eyes, or simply
cease functioning. Traditional print has spatial boundaries --
the artifact, once fixed, does not change size. It also has
boundaries in time -- it does not alter its content (a new
edition is a different edition).

The design challenges posed by the Web are unparalleled in either
print or television. Designers in this medium have the luxury of
neither linear narrative structure nor temporal cohesiveness.
Although they might conceptualize the site as a whole,
construction must allow for multiple points of entry and maintain
coherence in spite of the facts that users frequently do not
visit every page and they may attend to the site over several
visits. Web sites can be enormous and although electronic media
may have a larger storage capacity than print, the possibilities
of loss are immense. While books remain unaltered over time, Web
sites can, and do, change by the minute. New applications can
even make old pieces of text inaccessible.

+ Page 21 +

Different characteristics are foregrounded in World Wide Web
coherence. How a reader moves through a text takes on more
significance than ever before. Authors and publishers can no
longer assume sequence. Issues related to navigation, such as the
presence of other media and the manner in which they are
incorporated into the full text, take on primary importance.
Where is the most effective location for animation?  How deep an
interaction is required for engagement?  How much material should
appear on a "single" screen?  These are questions that must
inform any Web design.

A rhetoric of associations is driving Web criticism. Critique now
asks whether authors have anticipated appropriate connections,
and whether existing connections are relevantly articulated. An
artful and cogent link is just as valuable as a well crafted
paragraph. In a world which has seen a shrinking quantity of the
written word, the way words are threaded together becomes
increasingly important.

Another significant characteristic is the choices provided for
the user. Alternative ways of experiencing the material will
become the norm and a text without wide variety of paths through
it may not gain a readership. Coherence may become anchored in
the possibility of experiencing different layers of a single
work. Construction of a story may require each user to piece it
together from the several symbolic modes provided. In fact, users
will find it imperative that they interact with the text in order
to gain a complete understanding of what they are reading. The
requirement of interactivity is a perplexing one and as yet
neither the Web nor traditional hypertext have figured out how to
manage it.

Narrative has a strong hold on our psyches, as is evidenced by
the most popular World Wide Web sites. A recent (and ongoing)
World Wide Web project in Baltimore, MD, called E/Street attempts
to create an electronic neighborhood where local business, houses
of worship, schools, and government offices have a communal Web
presence. Both the prototype site used to pitch the project to
participating institutions, and the actual site as it develops,
are driven thematically by a storytelling model. Every
institution in the site is represented by a host of material. The
Web site of a single location might contain a description, a
portfolio of relevant material, biographies of employees,
directions, notes about its relationship to the community both
through time and in the physical present, all with links to the
history of the place. Contemporary and historical photos of the
neighborhood are available for the user to view. And each single
location's Web site is tied into the larger Web site of the
electronic community. The site, in essence, tells a story about
each institution on it and about how the community as a whole
grew into its present existence. The site's innovator, Neil
Kleinman, conceived of it as "Main Street" (standing in stark

+ Page 22 +

opposition to The Information Super Highway)-- a place where
people can stroll around and come to know their environment. The
model for E/Street was and continues to be strongly narrative,
assuming that even in cyberspace people want and need to make
sense of their environment, to construct it in a way that is
meaningful for them.

The stories on E/Street are not linear, the reader can wander
through a site deep with material, rich with paths. The story is
not told by the site builders but is constructed (and
re-constructed with each visit) with intentionality by the user.
On E/Street Web users can experience the simultaneous existence
of many threads of one story. One can, for instance, read the
history of a building, examine historical photographs of the
street, move to current photos of another building, read about
what takes place inside a building, obtain information about
various services, go to a bulletin board for some exchange of
notices and pleasantries, and so on, and so on, and so on. The
"neighborhood" of E/Street is what each visitor constructs.

Narrative remains, but somewhat altered in form.  Linearity and
sequence are no longer its driving values. Multi-threaded
storytelling, and the elements associated with constructing such
a story take center stage. Associations, links, and choices
inform the rhetoric of the World Wide Web.

Layered storytelling and creating a variety of voices are edging
out cause-and-effect and the notions of privilege that are
associated with print. The texture of the web is
multi-dimensional, offering users the opportunity to be much more
participatory in constructing the world. The monolithic voice of
print may topple in the universe of the World Wide Web. It will
no longer be acceptable to present only one version of a story.

As users of the World Wide Web, we will become accustomed to a
differently constructed worldview, informed not by the values
associated with print, but by those associated with the hypertext
of the Web. It becomes not only a rhetoric of arrivals and
departures, but a rhetoric of associations and connections, of
alternatives and interactivity. The most peculiar intrinsic
property, that of digital disturbance, will most certainly have
an impact on our understanding both of the new media and of the
world. Perhaps we will see a rhetoric of disappearance, a
paradigm of evanescence. Lurking beneath the electronic diversity
of the World Wide Web is the omnipresent possibility that at any
moment the text may simply vanish.

ENDNOTES:

1. That LeVine compares her show to both a drama and a news
magazine format show in the same breath must tell us something
about television in general and television narrative in

+ Page 23 +

particular. She sees the two shows as pulling in the same
audience because they are about the same subject matter. Never
mind that one is, in theory at least, fact based and the other is
fiction. To LeVine, both are stories, but in their present
incarnations, neither is rapid enough.

2. The television almost becomes a member of the family. For an
insightful discussion of this concept see a study by Ann McIntyre
(1989) following children's use of television.

3. A problem with linking a web site to another web site is that
there is no promise of getting the reader/user back once she has
followed that link. Although agreements like the "The CREW
Compact" exist, initiated by Stuart Moulthrop and Nancy Kaplan,
which states "Should a fellow user of the World Wide Web request
that I include within my own work a link to her or his work, I
will make every reasonable effort to accommodate that request."
these are subscribed to by only a minuscule number of Web users.
On commercial sites links usually direct the user first to an
exit page. On an exit page the user is notified that she is about
to leave the current web site and asked if this is what she
wants. Exit pages make it clear to the user where the boundaries
of the site lie and they are an attempt to keep users from
wandering to other sites. Trying to detain users at a particular
page is anathema to the idea behind the World Wide Web; the very
structure of the Web encourages users to peruse links rather than
linger in one spot. Personal home pages do not usually make use
of this device, and their boundaries may be less visible to the
user.

4. A related element privileged by World Wide Web sites is
collecting: Assembling large databases of information. Because it
is a distributed hypertext there is no problem with storage space
since the collected items are not actually required to reside
together as a unit. It may be that in the future coherence will
be determined partially by how much supporting evidence is
provided.

5. It is certainly possible that research will show that all
paths through the material are not equal, that each will leave
the user with the a different conceptualization of the material
covered. In fact, users will probably experience, remember, and
learn from the material very differently. Nevertheless, the Web
will have its impact in this arena, much as "Sesame Street" moved
us all new visual expectations.

6. See my study of introductory communications textbooks for a
discussion of what occurs when both authors and editors attempt
to represent views which do not match their own agenda.

+ Page 24 +

WORKS CITED

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Lucaites, John. L. &  Condit, Celeste M. (1985). "Re-constructing
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_________________________________________________________________

+ Page 26 +

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Stephanie B. Gibson, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at the
University of Baltimore and has recently become the director of
the specialization in "Language, Technology and Culture". A
communications theorist, her recent publications include pieces
on hypermedia focusing on paradigm, pedagogy, narrative, and
other cultural implications. She is co-editor with Lance
Strate and Ron Jacobson of the book "Communication and
Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment", due
out from Hampton Press this Spring, and has guest edited a
special issue of the journal "Readerly/Writerly Texts" devoted to
Hypermedia, due out this summer. She can be found on the World
Wide Web at:

http://raven.ubalt.edu/gibson

email: sgibson@ubmail.ubalt.edu

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the
                             21st Century

Copyright 1996 University of Maryland Baltimore County.  Copyright of
individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual
authors.  Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by the
University of Maryland Baltimore County. It is asked that any
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Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style
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