It's in its DNA.

Look around the web and there are links galore, but very little consciously hypertextual writing. There are still authors of fiction writing hypertextually, though they seem to have become a niche taste and even if their fiction is taken seriously, very few people probably truly care. Some games have true hypertextual elements to them, but I frankly don't know enough about these to write anything meaningful about them. And as to hypertextual writing like what the Boidem tries to maintain? There's probably less of that than there is hypertextual fiction, and even fewer who care.

As I've noted (somewhere) before, to a large extent the World Wide Web struck the death knell for associative hypertext (in a similar manner to how the success of Wikipedia closed the book on other wiki projects). In earlier days hypertext garnered a cadre of theoreticians who examined its special qualities. Christian Vanderdorpe, in his 1999 book From Papyrus to Hypertext - Toward the Universal Digital Library wrote:

In terms of thematic and symbolic content, texts are often far from linear. In fact, the term text itself, which comes from the Latin textus, originally referred to the action of weaving, intertwining, or braiding, which implies the existence of several threads in a web and the creation of patterns through the periodic reappearance of these threads. Thus the visual metaphor has been present in the very concept of text from the earliest times. This paradigmatic aspect of text belongs to the spatial order. The process of generating meaning while reading is not necessarily linear, and semioticians such as A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes have shown that "the existence of pluri-isotopic texts contradicts the linearity of signification at the level of the content." (p. 23)

But it seems that the promise of non-linear text as a logical continuation of the linear type that we were so accustomed to was doomed to remain only a promise.

Go to: How to write a Boidem column.