Two painters, alone in the night, fervently work on their objets d’art.  One, concerned with borders and lines, and the obviousness of it all, creates on her canvas a network of lines, circles, and primary colors.  The other, thinking more about the medium (or rather the way she can master the colors and images), whimsically lets her hands wander on the surface, combining hues and smudging shapes.  As the sun peaks its head over the hillside, each artist will have created her own oeuvre.  Networks of lines and shapes, blurred lines and indistinguishable endings, like the paintings, hypertext has achieved that same structure.  The goal of hypertext, it would seem, is to create works of increasing abstraction so that the way in which we relate to a written work gradually moves away from its informational content to the object, in and of itself.  The transition is, by far, not an easy one.  The academy is fraught with controversy over the obscurity of the hypertext medium.  Landow, in his section of Hyper/Text/Theory entitled “What’s a Critic to Do?,” attempts to reconcile the differences between hypertext and the printed page—differences that are as blatant, yet as subtle, as those between an abstract painting and an impressionist painting.     

            The blurred edges of hypertext are represented by the concept of seemingly indistinguishable authorship.  The author function becomes less significant as hypertext modes of textuality allow for a cacophony of voices to be included in each work.  In contrast to the read-only versions of hypertext (those which cannot be annotated or amended), networked textuality allows for greater flexibility.

The particular importance of networked textuality—that is, textuality written, stored, and read on a computer network—appears when technology transforms readers into reader-authors or “wreaders,” because any contribution, any change in the web created by one reader, quickly becomes available to other readers.  This ability to write within a particular web in turn transforms comments from private notes, such as one takes in margins of ones’ own copy of a text, into public statements than, especially within educational settings, have powerfully democratizing effects (Landow 14).   

Hypertextual liberation comes from the shift from an expressive author who bears his or her soul in writing, to a community of voices who individually shape the text.  The intersection between readers and writers is blurred in hypertext.  The notion of the “author” is, in fact, really just the intersection of various texts that they read.  No person can translate all there is to read into a certain work, so the possibility to add more voices of authority empowers the “wreaders” of the would-be static text to actually alter the work to accommodate their readings.  “Features that permit annotation transform the reader into an author.  Using a bookmark facility similar to that found in many electronic text presentation systems, readers can annotate individual cards of passages in them” (Landow 20).  The distinction between footnotes and “true-text” becomes blurred, as it is increasingly difficult in hypertext to differentiate between the two.  For literary scholars, this blurring of the edges means a weakening of the traditional associations regarding authorial property.  To make amends with this loss, it is necessary to understand the transition of the medium.

Some have regarded this abstraction of authorship as a “second orality,” or rather a return to a time where the past is recreated every time it is performed. 

Some estimates claim that aircraft mechanics spend more than half their working day performing research in the form of consulting printed text.  Therefore, any improvement in the way maintenance worker’s time and also the enormous financial and ecological cost of producing frequently replaced paper documentation.  Companies like Boeing Aircraft Corporation have therefore devoted great attention to hypertext repair manuals, which permit the maintenance worker to trace the history of a particular component or system and also to follow out its connections to other components (Landow 8).  

The network function of hypertext allows us to navigate through already explored paths and to create new paths of exploration.  The simple bookmarking feature of hypertext allows for “ease with which that form permits manipulation, searching, and (to use the new jargon) re-purposing” (Landow 27).  It is not necessary to retrace the steps that were taken in order to return to a certain lexia, for you can create a direct link to that which you need to see.  Should the reader not bookmark the lexia, the recreation of a path to it becomes problematic, for the steps you choose may not lead you to your desired location.  In some texts, like Raymond Queneaus’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèms, “the user is invited to flip the strips individually, to form 100,000,000,000,000 different combinations” (Landow 34).  In this sense, it is impossible to develop an absolutely thorough reading of the text.  “The great and defining power of digital technology lies in its capacity to store information and then provide countless virtual versions of it to the readers, who then can manipulate, copy, and comment upon it without changing the material seen by others” (Landow 11).  Links blur the boundaries that have been traditionally denoted by page numbers.  Whether the text has one author or many, these literary hypertexts “permit readers to choose their own paths through a set of possibilities, and dissolve the fundamental fixity that provides the foundation of our critical theory and practice.”  In a sense, the malleability of the text allows the readers to shape their own realities. 

            Reality is created by difference.  The construction worker is different from the elementary school teacher, the teacher is different from the government aid worker, and so on.  People in all walks of life create different realities, and it is safe to say that no one can justify one being more valuable to society than another.  I find it problematic then, that Landow manifests such elitism when referring to the shaping of hypertext.

That aircraft, airline, and other industries whose technicians must perform as knowledge workers have turned their attention to hypertext manuals has several implications for literary and cultural theory, the first of which is that many people not usually thought of as professional readers or knowledge workers will spend many hours of their working lives experiencing electronic text long before most scholars of literature and culture become aware that it exists.  Another is that if those interested in literature and culture do not make their needs felt, the only hypertext systems available will have been shaped by the needs of those not primarily concerned with creating, studying, or disseminating cultural artifacts (Landow 8—italics mine). 

Landow seemingly devalues the work already done in hypertext by referring to its creators as not necessarily professional readers.  Is the work of a professor more valuable than the work of an airline mechanic?  Does the creation of hypertext by professionals in systems analysis make for a work of lesser cultural and literary value?  I would argue that by basing his work on these non-traditional literary works, Landow validates what he seemingly criticizes.  Landow is ultimately conforming to the structural perspective of supreme authorial intention.  Hypertext was created by many people from all professions and, by assuming that one profession’s needs are more valuable than another’s, Landow wants badly to prescribe some sort of supreme authorial voice—a voice heard from someone in academia.  The goal of hypertext, I would argue, is to deconstruct that traditional notion of the author. 

The modern reader’s relationship to language has shifted from traditional modes of textuality to a more visual media, a media that hypertext is slowly learning to embody.  “Electronic textuality brings with it many changes, but not all concern loss” (Landow 32).  Hypertexts involve change and the creation of a fragmented reality, two things that the traditional reader is reluctant to embrace.  The success of the visual hypertextual medium lies in the ability for us as critics to adapt to this more communal form of subjectivity.  Hypertext’s success is also contingent upon the critic’s ability to look beyond his or her desire for informational content in order to accept the medium through which that content is delivered.  It may seem like interlocking networks of seemingly unrelated content, but the way in which it is created is rich in form and content.  The critic of a painting sees just as much in a Picasso as he or she does in a Degas, it is time to recognize the possibilities that hypertext contains for artistic recognition.