I think we agreed that we were gonna just put some stuff on the wiki and let it go for a while. So let me explain the content I'm gonna start to post. It doesn't need to be what we end up with or anything. I was thinking about the experience of reading these hypertexts and one thing it reminds me of is canoe trips through the systems of lakes and rivers that comprise the Minnesota-Ontario border. A typical trip is 2 weeks, starts at one lake and ends at another.

-Titles are doing are lot more work here than we're used to. What kind of book is it in which every page has a title?

So I was making the ol' bookmark bar rounds and came across this review of Al Gore's new book. The 3rd and 4th sections of the article (they start with a giant "T" and "I", respectively) concern Gore's commentary on television and the internet. Basically, Gore sees television as having ruined the national discourse by transforming the American citizen into a passive couch potato (actually a hypnotized chicken here) who only recieves information and does not engage in any sort of feedback.

My experience as an author of non-linear texts is confined to a narrative project my 5th grade teacher had us do. This is 1996. We used a program called Hyperstudio, a sort of Powerpoint meets Kidpix which allowed you to use buttons (links, essentially, but they were called buttons in Hyperstudio) that transported you to another page.

The thing was, being 1996, our classroom only had a few computers, so the teacher had us diagram our 2nd person plots beforehand so as to speed up the hyperstudioing once it was our turn on the machine.