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Metz has argued and shown that even a single close up image in a film can not be thought of as any way equivalent to a word. This is important for Metz to demonstrate the ways in which cinema is not a language, where language is understood in primarily linguistic terms. it is also important because it allows us to see that narration is composed of sequences and that the sequence becomes a sequence on the basis of narrative 'integrity' (wholeness, comprehension, temporal or thematic unity). This suggests that the definition and decision of what constitutes a sequence lies as much outside of each of its parts as it does within the content of its parts.
However, while it may be reasonably apparent in cinema that a close up is not like a word, it is more difficult to see this in the case of hypertext, where single word nodes can be common. It is not immediately clear whether these are just 'words' in the common sense of the term, or something more, but it should be remembered that if hypertext theory is serious in its claims for fluid or variable text then font face, weight, colour, screen placement, and window type are all choices made (even where they are not, apparently, chosen) and so, as any graphic designer can tell us, are certainly more than just a word. Indeed, it may be possible to argue that a single word node (discounting for the moment the status of the nodes title) is always more than just a word simply by virtue of the decision to make a single word node.
Adrian Miles: Hypertext syntagmas: cinematic narration with links
A performative hypertext presented by Journal of Digital Information