Discussions about hypertext fiction often raises the challenges to linearity that it presents, with the reader often controlling where a narrative goes, rather than the author. With a hypertext narrative, the author doesn’t even know every of the countless possibilities that the story could go, with the reader playing with the concept of linearity.

Although hypertext allows individuals to do this with an unprecedented level of freedom and interactivity, people have proved that it’s still possible without hypertext, through more traditional mediums of media.

This was seen with the new, fourth season of Arrested Development, which was released in a non-linear form, with every episode focusing on a specific character rather than a specific timeframe. Within a very short space of time, an entrepreneurial individual had edited the footage into chronological order, providing linearity to a narrative that previously had little. This was a person taking a usually fixed and permanent medium and proving it to be slightly more interactive than previously thought. We at least have the power to alter the links and timing, but the actual footage or text remains exactly the same.

The A Song Of Ice And Fire series also saw this level of fan meddling, after the fourth and fifth books were split up by location, rather than by linearity. Once again, a committed fan provided a means to return this narrative to chronological order, with someone providing a detailed instructional guide on how to read the books as a combined entity, provided a cohesive story. 

There are many, many other examples of this, such as with Pulp Fiction and Memento, and I think this shows just how desperate we as readers or the audience are for interactivity, and how we crave the ability to have control and flexibility with a text.

Even with  mediums such as television and books, that are so fixed and rigid, people have found ways to be more involved with the narrative, so just imagine what this could be like with hypertext, a medium that actually encourages this level of interactivity and ingenuity.