George Landow, Espen J. Aarseth, Stuart Moulthrop and manyothers have heralded the development of hypertext because theybelieve it represents a revolution in textuality that will radicallyalter how we read and write, including of course how we read andwrite narrative. Print texts, we are reminded by the champions ofthis new medium, are linear while hypertexts are nonlinear.Consequently, the argument goes, print narratives encourage readingin a fixed, straight-line sequence—one word after another, onepage after another—under the control of the author. Even postmodernattempts to subvert the fixity of the print sequence cannotovercome the stability of the printed page and the restrictions onformat imposed by the traditional book. Hypertext narratives, onthe other hand, are fluid by design; their sequence changes basedon readerly decisions. To put it another way, as those who advancethis argument sometimes do, readers approach hypertext narrativesfrom variable positions within the narrative, and so their progressionthrough the text—indeed, the progression of the text—is notfixed but variable from reader to reader and from one readingoccasion to the next. If the medium is the message, as MarshallMcLuhan so famously pronounced, then it would follow that readinghypertext narratives should be a significantly different experiencefrom reading print narratives. It is our hypothesis, however,that the differences between hypertext and print narratives are neitheras absolute nor as stark as they first appear and that understandingtheir similarities will enhance our understanding of eachindividually. We will support this hypothesis by calling attention tosome frequently neglected features of narrative progression in bothprint and hypertext narratives and by analyzing the progression ofone well-known hypertext, Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden.
Source: article's introduction