Well, by "hypertext" I mean nonsequential writing -- text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen
As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways.
Hypertext is the word's revenge on TV.
A hypertext has no canonical order. Every path defines an equally convincing, appropriate reading, and in that simple fact the reader's relationship to th etext changes radically. A text as a network has no univocal sense, it is a multiplicity without the imposition of a priciple of domination.
Hypertext... calls into question (1) fixed sequence, (2) definite beginning and ending, (3) a story's "certain definite magnitude," and (4) the conception of unity or wholeness associated with these other concepts.
With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers on structures as much as on prose.... The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create.
Hypertext is not a recofiguration of narrative but offers an alternative to it.
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