From Lexias to Remediation: Theories of Hypertext Authorship in the 1990s

How electronic-writing technologies will affect authorship remains an
important issue in hypertext theory. Theorists agree that the author’s function
has changed and will continue to change as writing migrates from the page to
the screen, but they disagree on the specifics of how print-based and
hypertext-based authorship differ and whether this digital migration constitutes a radical break from the age of print. Early hypertext
advocates, writing in the early 1990s, claimed that naviagational features, such
as hypertextual links, transfer a large degree of textual control from writers
to readers, thus blurring the distinction between the role of the author and
that of the reader. More recently, theorists began to dispute the idea that the
hypertextual reading experience was necessarily more creatively empowering than
reading a printed book. Exploring the arguments of influential hypertext
theorists, this paper traces developments in hypertext theory in the United
States during the 1990s. It describes how poststructuralism has informed
hypertext theories of authorship, identifies problematic or undertheorized
claims made about hypertext, and points towards new avenues of theoretical
inquiry that hypertext scholars are beginning to explore. It endorses the
recent medial turn in hypertext theory and argues that literary scholars must
revise existing theories of authorship to better articulate how hypertexts are
produced and function within online networks where the written word coexists
with streaming multimodal content. (Source: author's abstract.)