I remember sitting on the front porch of the Johnston Center at the University of Redlands, looking out over the sprinkler--dotted grass and neatly trimmed palm trees, and trying to explain what is meant by linking--that it is more than the connection to a footnote that can transport a reader to a referred-to text. Now I think it might be difficult to find a group of people at a university who think they don't know what is meant by linking. The World Wide Web has become pervasive with dizzying speed, and this development has shifted the site of discourse on hypertext/media so drastically that the specific technologies of the Web now seem to define the terms. Yet the Web is not a simple instantiation of our previous hypertext dreams, and neither is it simply a recapitulation of an earlier model of literature. Which leads us both to what I perceived as the Nelsonesque hypertext/media model's two major distinctions from the literature I knew, and also into a discussion of how these differences are playing out on the Web.

In "Grammatology Hypermedia," Gregory Ulmer evocatively re-imagines scholarly writing as linking and filtering: "In hypermedia, the scholar does not provide a specific line of argument, an enunciation, but constructs the whole paradigm of possibilities, the set of statements, leaving the act of utterance, specific selections and combinations, to the reader/user. Or rather, the scholar's 'argument' exists at the level of the ideology/theory directing the system of the paradigm, determining the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion."