Animated text is text that controls the reader more than does static text. But all information technologies to some extent control their audiences:
We must stop and listen to the speaker, or watch and listen to the video rather than doing something else.
Or we must read text created by others, and that text consists of signals that direct the reader to behave in certain specific ways: comedy produces laughter, satire laughter with a bitter twist, erotica arousal, tragedy arousal of pity and fear, melodrama excitement and suspense.
Directed action: All infotech requires both the audience's temporarily coming under the power of an artifact created by another and also exercising imagination and understanding in ways directed by that artifact — whether speech, or writing, or image, or sound, or movement, or a combination of them.
Michael Joyce famously asserted that "hypertext is the revenge of text upon television" (Of Two Minds, 47, 111) by which I take him to mean that hypertext demands active readers in contrast to television's relatively passive audience. These examples of animated (or disappearing) text in contrast appear to be extensions of television and film to encompass and dominate text, or in Joyce's terms, the revenge of television (broadcast media) upon hypertext. This is not necessarily a bad thing, any more than cinema is worse than print narrative. Animated text, like cinema and video, exists as an art form with its own criteria. One of those criteria is that it controls the reader more than does audience-controlled media, such as print text, painting, and hypermedia.
Is this different power-ratio significant?
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