canonical     commentary     quotation     reference     external  


Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
parole

Semiotics makes a distinction between 'langue' and 'parole'. Langue is language, the set of rules that lets language be possible (the rules of what sounds are meaningful, their order or combination, and then grammar, etc). Parole is how a language is actually used, it is the instantiation in practice of langue. Langue makes parole possible, yet langue can only ever be constituted by parole. We all know, if only unconsciously, the rules of langue in our first languages, as complex and abstract as these are.

Metz's point is that this relationship is considerably diluted in cinema, and it would appear in hypertext too. I can obviously quote in cinema and hypertext, but this is different from having to articulate a hypertextual (or cinematic) sequence according to a set of requirements that make the sequence possible in the first instance. We don't need to learn this set of rules to be able to write hypertext. We do learn a set of rules as a normative constraint (this is good, that is bad) but this is fundamentally different to langue where to speak ungrammatically risks unintelligibility. Even bad links are intelligible.

Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by
Journal of Digital Information