ypertext" and "hypermedia" are cyber buzzwords. Like "interactivity", their meaning tends to be fluid. For my purposes, a hypertext is a collection of discrete nodes of digital text with multiple links between them. It is a text conceived as a range of possibilities rather than a structure. Reading a hypertext, therefore, means choosing among links to pursue, jumping from node to node. It means assembling a provisional whole out of fragments in the process of encountering them. The difference from a print text is, of course, fundamental. In place of a single, unilinear reading sequence, hypertext offers an array of multi-directional links. In place of fixed structure, the contingency of choice. In place of closure, an awareness of other, potential versions hovering like ghosts. In place of reading as passive reception, an active process of co-creation. And in place of writing as control -- of structure, of sequence, of meaning -- the proliferation of possibilities. What this amounts to is a transformation of the idea of a text itself, how it functions and what it does, no less than how it is made. For a writer of any kind, to engage seriously with the idea of hypertext is to recognize that, sometimes, the technology is the vision.
It is perfectly possible to think electronically with paper and pencil. (G. Ulmer)
It is equally possible to write electronically with paper and pencil, to create a hypertext in non-digital form. The only requirement is an understanding that doing so means writing differently. To write hypertextually is to write for resonance rather than coherence, allusion rather than completion. It is working with fragments, creating structures that are potential not final. For a playwright, it means rethinking concepts like "character", "plot", "unity", "development" and "resolution", shaping ideas premised on fixity and sequence. Most fundamentally, writing hypertextually means abandoning the idea of meaning as a fixed content to be contained and delivered. In its place is an open-ended process of meaning-making in which the reader/spectator is actively engaged, and of which she is always critically aware. The play's goal then becomes the generation of meanings in the plural, tenuous, provisional, elusive, contradictory. It is the difference between an open system and a closed one.