On the Interactive Reader

The title of this post has a kind of tongue-in-cheek meaning for me because when I think of the Interactive Reader, I automatically think of the consumable versions of the English textbooks I use in my classroom.  Though I’ve been ostensibly using these for years (mostly as bookshelf dust catchers), I’ve never really considered the title proclamation of interactivity.  What makes the Interactive Reader interactive?  After taking a cursory glance inside one of them, I come up with the following reasons the textbook company might consider it appropriate to call the reader interactive:  1)  the kids are allowed to (gasp!) write in it; 2) the text encourages note-taking by providing carefully-structured questions along the margins, along with nice little spaces for answers; 3) it has Critical Thinking Activities at the end of each story/article, encouraging students to connect the texts with one another and with their own experiences.

I think that, in the context of reader interactivity and a reader’s ability to manipulate the text itself, the only thing notable in those three features is the students’ ability to write on the pages of the book without incurring the wrath of their teachers.  They are not given room to influence the text; they have no ability to manipulate it within the confines of the prescribed interactive features.  What the Interactive Reader strives to do, in other words, is to encourage students to engage with and think about the text.  I don’t necessarily object to this (ahem), though I prefer other methods of teaching reading skills.  Clearly, though, to call these texts interactive is not precisely correct.

In order to be truly interactive, a text must not only engage the reader, but give the reader an opportunity to influence or manipulate its elements.  Within the print medium, this is a tall order.  The most commercially successful attempt at true interactivity in print came in the form of the Choose Your Own Adventure series (also called gamebooks) originally published in 1975.  I call this an attempt, though, because the books – though they do give the reader some control over the narrative – offer only clearly-defined choices which lead the reader to outcomes already planned and written by the author.  In other words, in this form of interactivity the author never truly cedes control of the text to the reader.  Other attempts at interactivity within the print medium have been published, of course, but as far as I could tell they more or less faced the same challenges as the Choose Your Own Adventure books – the reader was given choices or certain opportunities to interact with the text or add his/her own voice in some way, but the control remained with the author.

Perhaps I should consider a line, though.  These attempts, even the poor Interactive Reader consumable text I mentioned at the beginning, do give the reader opportunities to interact with the text, but I would argue that even with the choices and the questions and the ability to physically manipulate via writing on the page, the reader is not given much more opportunity for interaction than he or she is able to get simply by reading a text and letting imagination fill in the linguistic and narrative gaps.  What the Interactive Reader and the CYOA series do not do is give the reader a real opportunity to influence the text.  This is what the digital medium has the opportunity to offer readers, but has not done thus far.

Hypertext fiction is one way in which authors have attempted to use the capabilities of the digital medium to introduce influence, but as Peter Lunenfeld noted in The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, within the first attempts at hypertext, “you had a choice as a user/reader, but your choices and paths were often predetermined by the author” (52).  This seems to be a digital throwback to the CYOA series, but one with which Lunenfeld recognizes potential for advancement within the World Wide Web and its ability to jump around with what he calls “real randomness.”  Links not only have the ability to take you to different, author-created points within a text, but to take you to places completely outside the text – places that may or may not actually be related to what you’re reading.  I’m a little bit suspicious of this.  The question seems to be how to stay inside of a narrative and influence that narrative in a real way, not how to jump around in the same manner as I conduct my morning perusal through my Google Reader feed.

When we discuss digital narrative, does it in fact lose all its meaning when you make it truly interactive?  Do readers of what Florian Hartling refers to as Net Literature (“Hypertext and Collective Authors” 289) actually want to be taken outside of a narrative during their reading experience in the random way mentioned by Lunenfeld, or do they, as Lee Scrivner suggests in “The Echoes of Narcissism in Interactive Arts”, become “nostalgic for the non-interactive paradigm, in which [they] would be acted upon by art?”  Though Scrivner is referencing George Felton’s description of the benefits of the non-interactive Walden, the question is appropriate.  At what point does narrative within the digital medium stop being narrative and start being something else?  Is it possible to create a story-driven, interactive fiction that allows the reader to, in Felton’s words, “direct the action” (Felton 1, qtd. in Scrivner 284) and yet still gives the opportunity for the reader to be acted upon by the text?

In a previous post (Tradition, the Reader, and the Digital Author), I made mention of the HTML-based Penguin Amplified and Enhanced E-Books.  These books make use of hypertext in a completely different way than in the 1980s and 1990s versions of hypertext fiction as created by platforms such as Storyspace. Instead of “jumping” the reader to different points in the text, these versions of e-books use hypertext to allow extratextual and paratextual information to be accessed from within the story itself.  Like my poor consumable dust catchers (read: Interactive Readers), these editions encourage interaction with the story on a certain level, but don’t offer opportunities for the reader to actually influence the narrative.

With all of this considered, the area of truly interactive digital literature is still wide open for authors, readers, and coders to explore.  The addition of “coders” to this list is of obvious importance.  Whatever digital literature’s unrealized capability might be, it will not be in the form of the classic, linear, textual narrative, and authors will either have to become coders or will have to team with coders in order to create narratives that make full use of the digital medium’s capabilities.  The successful interactive e-book or digital text will involve more than one set of creative hands if it is to define its medium rather than be defined by it.