In the course of historical evolution, the way humans perceive
their world has changed like their way of living has changed (Benjamin1963:14).
The expansion of cities has brought about a
new cognitive organization of perception. Perception has profoundly become
disturbed by stimulus satiation. In this context, Moholy-Nagy (1947:245)
writes:
"Motion, accelerated to high speed, changes the appearance of objects
and makes it impossible to grasp their details. There is a clearly recognizable
difference between the visual experience of a pedestrian
and a driver in viewing objects. The motor car driver or airplane pilot
can bring distant and unrelated landmarks into spatial relationships unknown
to the pedestrian. The difference is produced by the changed perception
caused by the various speeds, vision in motion".
Velocity has dispersed visual perception in discontinuous impressions
of the perceived phenomena. This dispersion is mirrored in literature in
the way our attitude towards reading and interpreting texts has changed.
Like the model of the iconic sign, the model
of narrativity is being derived from everyday
perception. This coherence between perception
and narrativity has lead to a change of style in the arts at the beginningof
our century (Smuda 1992), which demands the competence of the reader.The
reciprocal influence of the different arts broadens the possibilitiesof
narrative space in completely new ways.The
same increase of velocity and stimulus satiation is achieved in the medium
of hypertext, which leads to the difficulty that we deal with a space which
stretches our capacity of imagination. Therefore,
the hypertextual data space is virtually constructed as a landscape by
metaphors of space which we also use inother
fields of experience in order to make us acquainted with the new medium.
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