All rights reserved: Sean MacEntee

In the week four readings, Ted Nelson talks about hypertext as text that branches out into other areas of information, providing choices for where the reader can take their reading. Sort of like this.

This can be sequential information relevant to the topic discussed, such as the link that I just provided, or it can be non-sequential text such as this.

When you hear the word hypertext, it sounds a lot more confusing and complicated than what it actually is. We use hypertext regularly through our blogs without even realising it. Remember that cat video I embedded into my very first blog post? Yeah, that’s hypertext.

See those links down the right hand side of my blog? Hypertext.

You know when you’re reading an article on an online news service and they have a video embedded with footage from the scene of the story and links to related news stories inserted into the article? That’s a perfect example of hypertext used in everyday life; and we didn’t even know it was a thing.