So following the symposium today and having read the readings, the person who i felt was instrumental in all of this hypertext discussion is Ted Nelson.

Nelson’s definition of hypertext goes as follows:

“to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations; it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it. Let me suggest that such an object and system, properly designed and administered, could have great potential for education, increasing the student’s range of choices, his sense of freedom, his motivations, and his intellectual grasp”

Trying to wrap my head around the concept of a ‘hypertext’ in itself was my largest challenge this week however Nelson has been very useful in this and is discussed in the weekly reading. This reading is called “what interactive narratives do, that print narratives cannot” and emphasises how hypertexts are “non-sequential writing with reader-controlled links.”

Never before have we faced this non-sequential format of language because the web is the first place where we communicate in writing outside of the physical aspect of it, opening up a whole new world and network literacy and untapped potential.