Hypertext has exploded into our literate world and here we remain: the same people, the same dirt and soil we’ve always known, the same surroundings, the same life we had yesterday. Unchanged, unaffected, undisturbed?  Absolutely not.  We are experiencing a cultural shift and an equally transformative revolution in consciousness in large part because of this elusive, mysterious, intelligence we call hypertext.  What is this “thing” that is supposedly changing your life, you may be wondering?  Hypertext, as termed by George Landow, is “an information technology consisting of individual blocks of text, or lexias, and the electronic links that join them” (Landow 1).  The point- and-click way of life we are now submersed in and take as common place has not only invaded the way we shop, plan vacations, or research, but it has seeped into that idealistic leather-bound favorite collecting dust on the bookshelf.  It has revolutionized the novel, or for that matter, everything that contains a printed word.  Hypertext has not just befallen our society but has evolved out of the continuum of various communication customs our world has experienced.  Although still a new, ever-changing and advancing facet of life, hypertext can be examined in terms of our cultural history.  Starting from a pre-literate or oral culture and moving to where our culture resides currently, hypertext can be deemed as moving one step further away from reality or coming full circle back to where it all began.  Such is the most interesting aspect of this literate/cyber reality: one does not yet know if its movement is forward or reverse.  What we do know, however, is that, as our society changes, it also transforms our relation to the world. 

            Some people will never know the culture we are quickly leaving behind, our literate world filled with printed texts and paper documents.  They will only study it based on what we produce from this print culture - as we do with oral cultures.  For now, however, both the literate and cyber world are co-existing in a culture that revolves around the virtual.  Just as we trace our pre-existing cultures in order to learn about our current culture, so to will people one day look back to the ancient times of the pen and paper.  Take the perspective with which we look at oral culture, a culture “constrained by the here and now, communicating face to face...in which words have little meaning beyond the concrete things and situations familiar to him [the bard] and his audience” (Hobart and Schiffman 13).  The story communicated would be different each time recited; every persons' knowledge would be different and individual memory would be essential for any type of recollection.  As products of the 21^st century, we view this type of culture as archaic and inefficient.  We could not imagine living in a culture that produced no tangible information, only a reality created in dynamic time.  As a society we oftentimes fail to see how the present resembles the past.  Or maybe we, as a society, do not want to recognize what we perceive as progress as also simultaneous regression.

            Much to our relief, we consider ourselves to be shaped and molded by the experiences we have had in our literate culture.  However, as author of this essay, I find it difficult to write about a purely literate culture without being influenced by the beginnings of cyber culture, which has speedily transformed my relation to the world.  In fact, I believe it impossible as the line between the two becomes increasingly blurred - a word that in itself could summarize this complex issue.  Many distinctions have been blurred as we take paces away from our cozy and familiar world of print: student and teacher, speech and writing, mastery and sampling, reader and author.  Landow emphasizes this concept  “that in hypertext the function of reader merges with that of author and the division between the two is blurred” (Landow 14).  This concept can be used to further highlight how our relation to the world changes.  As individuals, we can be described as intersections of that which we encounter, read, and experience.  As we add layers to our cultural past, we add layers to our individuality. Each level represents a further step up or abstraction from a previous reality.  However, oftentimes one does not realize a change in oneself as they adapt the new technologies of each culture, another blurred progression. 

            In our enthralling class discussion, Mr. Dino Felluga brought us face-to-face with this concept when presenting the seemingly simple, kindergarten level question, “What is a tree?”  We responded as any typical individual exposed to our defining culture: leaves, roots, branches, trunk, shade, source of oxygen, photosynthesis.  This response is evidence of how one’s relationship to the world is changed as a new culture is introduced, particularly when Mr. Felluga told us how an oral culture answered this same question: “A tree is like a man whose arms reach up to heaven and whose roots are stuck in hell.”  With the introduction of literate culture we have transformed our relationship with the world from one of poetry, beauty, and romance into one of textbook definitions and scientific processes.  The fact that technology affects our thinking is undeniable.  How will a cyber culture further transform our thought process?  Hypertext has begun to answer this question for us.  

            Hypertext takes part in a post-modernist culture that has also been termed “secondary orality.”  Technology appearsinitially complex, as orality suggests regression while hypertext, residing in virtual culture, suggests advancement.  To understand how hypertext acts as a transforming agent, it is helpful to show the changes that have taken place in objects familiar to the masses.  Take a book as an example that represents the element that lies central to the concept of hypertext.  Hypertext changes the medium on which you "read a book" such as a “personal computer or mainframe terminal which both constrains one (by forcing one to read in a particular physical location)…and also removes a good deal of the physical pleasure associated with what many academics purport to hold as their ideal of the book - the luxuriously leather-bound object” (Landow 4).  In contrast to the world of print, “linking is the most important fact about hypertext” allowing for “speed and manipulability of the digital world” (Landow 6, 20).  This is a true representation of the blurring that exists in our new culture, which “has a marked effect on the conception and experience of boundaries and limits in hypertext” (Landow 27).  Who is the author and who is the reader?  Who can master a text when “quantity (of hypertext) removes mastery and authority” (Landow 35)?  Teachers become those who learn using the “simulacra” our culture has become: a place of virtual representations of reality.

            Linking and connecting are words that detail what hypertext is all about.  Landow summarizes the concept with a  “blending and blurring of genres that makes a good deal of sense in the world of networked electronic text” (Landow 39).  The best way to experience this blending and blurring, the change in your relationship to reality, the virtualness of reading a hypertext, is to do just that; take the plunge and experience hypertext for yourself.  You may be thinking that you encounter hypertext every time you link from one web site to the next, when you check your e-mail, or when you surf through various search engines, but hypertext differs from simply following hyperlinks.  It was not until I encountered my first hypertext reading, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, that I realized the full implications of this revolutionary digital world.

 Differences hit you in the face from the moment you choose to encounter a hypertext book: a package arrives in the mail with your "book" in CD format, to open it you download the "book" onto your medium, the computer, and then you "turn the pages" by clicking your mouse.  I found myself reading a "book" while sitting in a computer lab surrounded by people with flourescent overhead lights glaring down on me - not to mention the burn in my eyes after hours in front of a digital screen.  You may be surprised to know that I also found myself loving every minute of it.  No, I was not curled up with a blanket in front of my fireplace leisurely reading an old favorite, but who is to say that will never happen as "technological developments promise to make radical changes in the reading site of electronic texts" (Landow 5).  We are just embarking on a new culture that is constantly changing and unpredictable.  I found myself on the edge of my seat, eagerly anticipating the next screen, just as if I were reading a book.  I almost forgot where I was sitting and the medium from which I read.  Hypertext has broken the rules of our traditional print culture where linear structure has been replaced by a nonlinear networked web - which has proven to be enticing, exciting, and innovative.  As of now it does not replace printed texts as we know them, but we can no longer deny its speedy expansion and power, nor the implications it has for how we orient ourselves to reality.  Everything is slowly changing and it is starting with the basics, from how we answer the question "what is a tree?" to how we read a book.     

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