The Boundaries of Hypertexts

"Hypertext is a characteristic product of the late age of print, which is to say, it is deeply ambiguous. While still dependent on alphabetic literacy, algorithmic programming, linearity, hierarchy, and other trappings of Gutenberg culture, hypertext implicitly challenges the episteme from which it sprang. Though any hypertextual document remains a limited and definable object, this object is much more like Roland Barthes's notion of 'text' -- a dynamic network of ideas, indefinite in its boundaries and mutable over time -- than like a teleologically closed literary 'work' [Landow Hypertext, 23]. The precise nature and boundaries of a hypertext are hard to define. The experience of reading for any two people who traverse its verbal space may be radically different: 'polylogue,' not monologue. Where multiple writers are involved, authorial voice and intention come in for serious questioning. In the World Wide Web, for instance, a single document may contain scores of references to other texts stored at various far-flung points around the Internet. A single reading may involve writings (and writers) from Baltimore to Bombay; and since many documents on the Web are regularly revised and updated, both the authorial corps and the textual corpus are subject to change" (Stuart A. Moulthrop "Getting Over the Edge" ).


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