Page 183 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

172 • Sport, Media and Society

Intertextuality

The form of organising text that is characteristic of the Internet, known as hyper-
text, allows for this high degree of intertextuality. In traditional media, ‘demarcation
lines between texts are easily drawn’ (Mautner 2005: 818), but hypertext links create
intertextuality and render Web sites borderless. Hypertext is, therefore, one of the
Internet’s most important features. Landow (2001: 99) described hypertext as ‘text
composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths,

chains, or trails in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the
terms link, node, network, web and path’.
Landow (2001) observed that this organisation of text matches exactly that con-
ceived of by Barthes (1974) as an ideal ‘writerly’ text, the antihierarchical open text
where readers are able to make their own meanings, rather than being restricted in
their capacity for interpretation by the structure of the text. The nonsequential, in-
teractive hypertext allows the user to make choices, creating his or her own trail of
knowledge.

Multilinearity

Critics such as Landow (2001) have suggested that the open architecture of the In-
ternet accords with the desire of poststructuralist philosophy to decentre meaning
and embrace multilinearity. The development of hypertext foregrounded users’ ca-
pacity to modify the text, changing fonts, making annotations, choosing their own
route. Laurel (2001: 110) has argued that it is possible to compare computer users
to theatrical audiences, but they are ‘like audience members who can march up onto
the stage and become various characters, altering the action by what they say and
do in their roles’. Of course, this means that the user ceases to be, in fact, a passive
observer of the performance provided by the computer, and instead becomes an actor
in his or her own right. As a medium, then, the Internet gives users unprecedented
agency, encouraging critics like Rowe (2004a: 204) to augur the transformation of
‘the passive sports media consumer’ into an ‘all powerful media auteur’.

Multivocality

An internet text constructed out of an interaction of multiple voices is the encyclopae-
dia Web site Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org). Wikipedia describes itself as being
written collaboratively by volunteers from all over the world. In addition to writing,
users can, and are encouraged to, edit existing pages. Links to other pages are placed
throughout articles so that pathways through the encyclopaedia are individualised to
the search requirements of users. In doing so, users are constantly shifting the centre
or focus of their investigation. In many ways, therefore, Wikipedia is an example of