The hypertext reading by George Landow was interesting. It pointed out concepts surrounding hypertext that I hadn’t really considered. Instead of thinking about hypertext as just clicking on something and it directs you to another page, ideas about ‘choose your own adventure’ style text were new to me. Like how hypertext makes online text differ from books, which are linear, have a distinct beginning and end and the physicality of the text is more separate from us than it is online. Due to hypertext, each texts borders are far more open, and all that is related to a topic is not required on one page. Books would generally provide a short explanation for everything so one is able to understand the main topic better and how they fit together, but if we look something up on Wikipedia, it saves time by just linking to the direct page to give us the information.

This reminds me of the very first unlecture, where we were encouraged not to repeat information that already existed. With the use of hypertext, the same explanation of something is not needed on countless Wikipedia pages, the one explanation of it can just be hyperlinked on all of the pages that require/ reference it. So although hypertext makes the spiderweb of pages and knowledge seem broader, it really makes it more concise. The spiderweb has more connections, but it is a smaller web in comparison to the world of books and encyclopedias.