To attempt to write, or even to read, a hypertext is to wander in a maze.
A three dimensional maze at that, as the many links provided by the author combine into unknown routes. The author cannot foresee the journey made by the reader.
A hypertext is nothing like a codex. Yes you may read the words on the page, but you cannot hold it or point back to the pages you have already mastered.
This is clearly described by Shelley Jackson.
this writing
Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest. When I open a book I know where I am, which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am a quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future. Or rather, history is only a haphazard hopscotch through other present moments. How I got from one to the other is unclear. Though I could list my past moments, they would remain discrete (and recombinant in potential if not in fact), hence without shape, without end, without story. Or with as many stories as I care to put together. (9)
