Hypertext...

1. In "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art", Landow and Delany suggest that “hypertext can be expected to have important institutional as well as intellectual effects, for it is at the same time a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, a mode of publication, and a resource for collaborative work… Hypertext historicizes many of our most commonplace assumptions, forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as corollary to a particular technology and historical era. We can be sure that a new era of computerized textuality has begun; but what it will be like we are just beginning to imagine."

This passage was written in 1991, at a time when hypertext systems were available in somewhat limited forms such as Hypercard and Intermedia, use of the Internet was largely confined to academic institutions, and the term “World Wide Web” had only just been coined. Now, 15 years later, comment and reflect upon the impact hypertext has had on the world.

The most apparent aspect that hypertext has impacted the world, I believe, is in the lifestyles of the people, especially in developed countries. People nowadays depend much more on the internet - hypertext news, hypertext information, hypertext searching, and hypertext communications. People no longer have the need to watch television or read the newspapers to get the latest news, but in fact may get it faster from the internet. People communicate through the internet and post their thoughts on blogs. Also, in terms of information gathering, users are flooded with a mass of information which may or may not be relevant. In the past, without the use of hypertext, people could not obtain information from numerous sources so easily. It was just the opposite, they had to search through libraries, catalogs, etc, and even if the obtained the right book, there was still the task of finding the relevant passage. Now, these processes have been cut down to simply searching on google. However, the flipside is of course, the overload of irrelevant information and that one has to now search through all the seemingly relevant information. Anyway, besides all these, hypertext has changed the way that things are presented to people. Consequently, "normal" text now has less appeal and may even be deemed outdated.