Landow and Hypermedia

George Landow asks: "Since hypertext radically changes the experience that reading, writing, and text signify, how, without misleading, can one employ these terms, so burdened with the assumptions of print technology, when referring to electronic materials?" (Landow 57).

Landow suggests hypertextuality inevitably includes a far higher percentage of non-verbal information than does print. "Because hypertext systems link passages of verbal text and images as easily as they link two or more verbal passages, hypertext includes hypermedia" (Landow 59). Multimedia applications, like hypermedia systems, allow users to forge their own nonlinear paths through images, sounds, and text.

Hypertext changes the way texts exist and the way we read them.

George Landow