In lines 446-451 of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Coleridge
powerfully evokes a sense of being pursued by the intangible:
Like one, that on a lonesome road
/Doth walk in fear and dread,
/And having once turned round walks on,
/And turns no more his head;
/Because he knows, a frightful fiend
/Doth close behind him tread.
The intangible fiend is close at hand as we navigate through the web.
Researched and named the "disorientation problem"
(Rouet and Levanon:
p.13), it breathes on our neck as we chose one possible path in an endless
network. The fiend whispers in our ear that we have missed some vital
piece of information, that we have lost our way on the road. Turning
around, as the Mariner turned his head, we see only paths - paths leads
into more paths, but without structure, without cohesion.
Perhaps we are pursued by our own lack of cognition - the desire for a
gestalt experience nudging us in circles in a futile attempt to find an
end to the road, to find the piece that will let us understand the whole.
" . . .[A] basic problem with hypertext is the lack of organizational cues
. . "
(Ibid.: p.18).
The fiend cannot be exorcised from hypertext, unless
we fully integrate those elements that are unique to it: vast amounts of
information in multiple forms. Cohesive organizational cues on every
level, particularly the macro-level, are needed to deal with the fiend.
