against reading a hypertext edition of a novel: "the thought of hyperlinking my way through Findley's Not Wanted on the Voyage is vaguely unsettling...." [1]

but compare Borges (Ficciones): "he's half hyper already". See:
http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/borges.html [2]

But even though Borges, Joyce, or Laurence Sterne are promoted as hypertextual in form, reading requires pauses of absorption, reflective thought, not the hypertextual "swirling dervish of link jumping and getting lost in the labyrinth" (Diane Brouwer, September 27) [3]

"Is the next generation of computer junkies going to have an even shorter attention-span than this one?!" [4]

But why are we comparing? "the wholesale dismissal of a new medium with unfamiliar practices by the standards of an older medium is always a risky gesture and perhaps foolish in hindsight" (Melanie Conroy, September 28)

Sites for alternative poetry/multimedia: http://www.burningpress.org
http://ctheory.concordia.ca/
And other webwork at: http://webdelsol.com/5_trope/5t_index.html

Hypertext is new; it hasn't replaced anything.

The purpose of writing anything is usually communication, so linear and hyper text have different communicative purposes.

[1] But re-reading in hypertext form for study may be appropriate? Cf. Landow's imagined edition of Milton, Hypertext 2.0 pp. 80-82. For an actual example, see this hypertext edition of Pride and Prejudice.

[2] And note the conversion of "The Garden of Forking Paths" to an actual hypertext by Moulthrop: see my account, "Moment," paras. 24-26.

[3] Absorption: it may depend on personality what kind of reader you are, or for what purpose you are reading.

[4] Michael Ignatieff, several years ago, produced a television series called, if I remember, The Seven Second Culture, about TV advertising, among other things.