September 3, 2008, 12:02 am by Ian

   I had to read through the first two sections of Burbules’ text about hyperlinks quite a few times without making progress in finding sense in the haphazardly strung together word jumbles about hyperlinks. Initially, I thought a lot of the thinking and writing was the height of academia and a bit wonky, but I trudged through a couple times more knowing that there had to be a nugget of rhetorical truth I could use.

   Even after devoting a greater amount scrutiny, I still feel lost and generally do not have any real idea what Burbules theorizes about the rhetorical nature of hyperlinks. A part of me thinks that he does not like the bland, utilitarian, almost arresting linearity of hyperlinks, but I know that this has to go much farther than “hyperlinks are too simple”. So, after another read through, I think I’m beginning to see that Burbules’ hyperlinks are supposed to be static, monolithic, linear links, but he is proposing that the rhetorical nature of these stagnate links can create a skeleton, a superstructure, a map of sorts that can define the greater part of web space in a rhetorical sense. In that highly simplified and potential misread the rhetorical use of hyperlinks makes a kind of sense.

   Although I found Burbules’ first two sections to be dry and wonky, his section on the Web’s rhetorical place was great rhetorical fodder, which also sparked some real world experiences for me. I worked at a graphic design firm some summers ago, and when we worked on a new client’s website, my boss wouldn’t talk about the usual aspects that go into web design, but rather he would go into theory of the space, how we could utilize form, and convey a message. In that sense, my boss was trying to see the website as a place to convey meaning more than information. Before issues on color, graphics, and text were even considered, my boss would urge us to think about constructing the feel of the website. Sometimes we felt that rhizomic map of the site would better suite the viewers, whereas other times we felt that the complexity of the “rhetoric” we needed to convey could be offset by a more linear architecture. Big on my boss’ list was expectation. We constantly had to think about what the viewer expected out of the website, and most of that consideration did not come from color, graphics, or text, but rather how the navigation worked, if the hyperlinks progressed in a simple way.

   Reading through Burbules’ text about architecture and rhetorical space made a whole lot more sense due to seeing the practical application of it first hand.