I was watching a documentary on the technological revolution on PBS; the issue of hypertext was widely discussed in the program. In this modern age of technology and multitasking, one of the concerns raised was in line with the lack of continuity in thought, reading and attention among the digital natives. The concept of non-linearity is often criticised along with multi tasking, a reason for attention deficiency. The students interviewed in Stanford admitted to writing in ‘paragraphs’ rather than an ‘essays’.
Aarseth (1994) explains text as “ a fixed sequence of constituents...” (p.763). The author also points out the two perspectives of text namely, a technical or historical, social perspective and individual perspective. Looking from such a perspective of text the relevance of hypertext will be more significant in a culture of ‘cloudsourcing’.
Non-linearity as not being a mathematical or logical consequence can bring in logical interpretation with the application of hypertext. As Aarseth (p.766) points out, nonlinear text can bring in turbulence and unpredictability, as often pointed by critics as ‘scary’ jump into the unknown. It seems sometimes that the nonlinear texts are snippets of energy outbursts.
