But let us have books that squirm and change under our gaze, or tilt like a fun-hour floor and spill us into other books, whose tangents and asides follow strict rules of transformation, like a crystal forming in a solution, or which consist entirely of links, like spider-webs with no corpses hanging in them. Language is the Great Unruly, and alphabetical order is a contradiction in terms. ~ Shelley Jackson ~
We live in a historical moment when the media on which the word relies are changing their nature and extending their range to an extent not seen since the invention of movable type. The changes have been building through the twentieth century, as the spoken word reanimated communication over telephone and radio, and as the moving image on film and television supplemented the "mere" word. The invention and dissemination of the personal computer and now the explosive growth in links between those computers on the worldwide networks of the internet create a genuinely new and transformative environment. ~ James O'Donnell ~
	"Hypertext" is not a system but a generic term, coined a quarter of a century ago by a computer populist named Ted Nelson to describe the writing done in the nonlinear or nonsequential space made possible by the computer. Moreover, unlike print text, hypertext provides multiple paths between test segments, now often called "lexias" in a borrowing from the pre-hypertextual but prescient Roland Barthes. With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as opposed to print's fixed unidirectional page turning) ... ~ Robert Coover ~
The advent of print made possible the preservation of ideas…allowing a work to be available to a multiplicity of readers over a multiplicity of ages. However, the permanence of the printed, linear version made retrieval of information difficult. Such devises as pagination, the table of contents, indices, and bibliographies made the work easier to access ... hypertext and the ability to cross reference through computerized links makes access easier still.
	Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly on our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg's movable type. ~ George P. Landow ~
A hypertext never seems quite finished, it isn't clear just where it ends, it's fuzzy at the edges, you can't figure out what matters and what doesn't matter and what's void, what's the bone and what's the flesh, it's all decoration or it's all substance. Normally when you read you can orient yourself by a few important facts and let the details fall where they may. The noun trumps the adjective, person trumps place, idea trumps example. In hypertext, you can't find out what's important so you have to pay attention to everything, which is exhausting like being in a foreign country, you are not native. ~ Shelley Jackson ~