. . . and I do mean "tease," in two ways, rather than some other more neutral or fashionable term such as draw out, unpack, or deconstruct. Writing hypertextually does give me the feeling of repeatedly seeing individual threads woven into the fabric of text that I want to tease out, draw attention to. What happens if I put in a new path for my reader here, or here? Where does it lead, to a new trail or a dead end? The teased out thread may, in fact, lead me (as writer or reader) in an entirely unforeseen direction. And I also mean "tease" in the sense of being playful. Many commentators have noted the playful tendencies of hypertext, Bolter even going so far as to say, "the electronic text never takes itself seriously, as a printed text inevitably does" (Bolter 1991, 165). This is an overstatement of the case, of course, but it is true that there is a playfulness about many hypertexts, perhaps some hint of the interactive game lurking in its shadows.
This thread, by the way, is only an aside rather than a new path, although it does provide a counterexample of a useful kind of link the the Web currently lacks, the annotation, which I discuss elsewhere.
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1st draft
Initial release: June 10, 1996
Last update: June 10, 1996