Contrary
to its popular usage, hypertext is not a medium.
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Rather,
hypertext is a modality, a
strategy for the construction, consumption, and negotiation
of knowledge.
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Hypertext,
as such, exists both in the pages of bound bleached cellulose (most explicitly
in the works of James Joyce and Jose Luis Borges) and inside the computer
screen.
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Nevertheless,
the recent surge of hypertextual production in the computer environment
(as manifest most voluminously on the World Wide Web) has begun to reconfigures
traditional ideas of research, readers, authors, teachers and students.
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This
deluge represents a potential epistemological shift.
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It is the shift from knowledge as a bounded set of signifieds to knowledge as the negotiation of signifiers. It entails a frame shift, from the conduit metaphor to the network metaphor |
