Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story
It’s not that hypertext went on to become less interesting than its literary advocates imagined in those early days. Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s just that the blocks of text turned out to be written by different authors, publishing on different sites.
.. Hypertext turned out to be a brilliant medium for bundling a collection of linear stories or arguments written by different people.
.. Each reading of the story could follow a different combination of nodes; “closure,” in this new form, was as obsolete as the printed page. “When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths,” Joyce wrote in the introduction, “the experience of reading it ends.”
.. Multiple print tomes appeared evangelizing hypertext storytelling, and a few even warned of the threat it posed to traditional narrative. The literary/philosophical world had been musing about the death of the author and fragmented, reader-centric text since the late 1960s, but suddenly all those abstract ideas were grounded in technological reality.
.. That future never happened. It turned out that nonlinear reading spaces had a problem: They were incredibly difficult to write.