Page 186 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

New Media Sportscapes: Branding and the Internet • 175

The Narrativity of Hyperlinks

In the early days of the Internet, underlining of words was the graphological conven-
tion for marking hypertext links. Contemporarily, however, any area of the page,
text or graphics, is potentially a hyperlink. This has the effect of requiring users to
move the cursor over every inch of the computer screen to see if there is a hyperlink
to another page, making this aspect of user activity ‘as routine a part of the reading
process as turning the pages in a book’ (Boardman 2005: 19). When verb phrases
are made into hyperlinks, Boardman (2005) suggested that they act in a similar way
to pull quotes in tabloid newspapers, that is, reported speech or other high-impact
extracts separated out from the text by editors to sum up the whole article. Boardman
(2005) maintained that the way hyperlinks are presented can make the difference
between a surfer following one of the links or hitting the back button on the browser
toolbar. Hover buttons or rollovers that use the dynamism of animation to lure you
into clicking, or the use of imperatives (e.g. ‘click here now’) as links to imply ur-
gency, act to move you forward in ‘the hyper-narrative’ (Boardman 2005: 25) as you
navigate the site.

Multimedia and Interactivity

While the Internet allows users to construct their own pathways, giving them a
greater degree of agency as consumers than older media forms, commercial Web
sites use a range of multimedia components to engage users in communicative ac-
tion on their terms. For advertisers, this presents both a problem and an opportunity.
Advertisers have the ability to speak simultaneously to different interest groups, but
their audiences are far from captive, and they need not move into the hypernarrative
unless they choose to do so. Multimedia elements have, therefore, created narrative
forms that depart from those available in traditional media, which act to make users
feel they are already involved in the story. Rotating banner advertisements, for ex-
ample, are common on commercial Web sites and are timed to be replaced by a dif-
ferent advertisement or a different part of the same one at intervals of a few seconds.
Internet users expect to begin reading at any point during the cycle. Rotating adver-
tisements are one of the ways language on the Web has moved from linear to cyclical
narrative form. Pop-up windows enable new windows to be opened by clicking on
links instead of loading the new window in the same page, so that several windows
can be open at once. This adds to the capacity of hypertext by making it ‘possible to
have several narrative threads on the go at the same time and switch between them’
(Boardman 2005: 62).
Drop-down menus and database searching are further interactive features of Web
sites that have developed in response to the growing complexity of the Web. The
repeated motif of the search dialogue box at the top of the Web page enables users
to short-cut hyperlink browsing and go directly to the page they require. Along with