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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