Hypertext: a term invented by Theodore Nelson to indicate a non-linear writing mode in which users follow multiple links and associative paths through a constantly expanding online library of textual documents to which users themselves may contribute.
The problem of reading among today’s twittering, digital-minded, and half-literate generation of students cannot be solved by the vaunted hypertext revolution in screenal reading practices as advocated in contrived and facile efforts like George Landow’s influential Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, where the centered text and univocal voice are duly dismissed as tyrannical.1 The electronic docuverse of textual juxtaposition and nonsequential tracking favored by our current crop of hyper-theorists clearly does not ground, expand, and complexify a reader’s response to a given text as its proponents confidently maintain.
Quite the contrary. It disperses and distractsthe attention,
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