So What?

The gap I see in extant scholarship is that though there is a great deal of research in the area of hypertext, not a lot (at least that I've found) deals with how hypertext theory plays out on the World Wide Web--this very specific hypertext system--rather than a generic or limited hypertext system that seems the focus of so much work in hypertext.

With the Web growing so dramatically, I don't find a problem with limiting my discussion to the Web--I believe it will be continue its growth and be a major force in communication and the scholarship associated with it. The reason I've chosen to focus on the Web is because of its shear size, its global nature and the connection to other Internet service (email, FTP, Gopher, Usenet News), and the capabilities of HTML. The combination of all these things make the Web a unique and very powerful hypertext system--it's not just linking and the freedom to follow a work based on association (which, of course, the Web has) but it's the access to all this information and the ease in which it can be obtained.

The "So what" is that as more and more organizations continue to become part of the Web, we need to take a theoretical look at communication there. Not just hypertext theory (which is a major component this work) but how that theory holds on the Web; does it fall short expectations about hypertext, or does it go beyond expectations? To all those who have difficulty with the idea of electronic texts, does the Web do more to answer their concerns or does it raise new and more frightening concerns for them? In short, here we have a global hypertext system, widely available, increasingly used, and powerful: how does hypertext theory go beyond just theorizing about the possibilities of electronic texts to dealing with this very real system? My work will be a look at how traditional notions of text, reader, author , and argument are challenged by documents on the Web--not just in a generic hypertext world--and what the implications are for professional communication.



By "generic" I mean a hypertext system that doesn't actually exist--as in scholars who refer to the capabilities of "hypertext." By "limited" I'm referring to discussions that mention, say, Storyspace or Intermendia which are not widely available on a network that links thousands of organizations.


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