The previous few weeks, we have read and blogged about design fiction, discussing and interpreting the way we might go about judging what is considered ‘real’ within the fiction.
However we are moving forward from this concept towards the more specific hypertext theory. As Adrian declares, this is because hypertext is a networked writing structure, it predates the World Wide Web (more commonly known as simply the web – which is a system of interlinked hypertext documents), and because many of its ideas provide an excellent way to approach how to theorise the Web not as technologies but as people who want to be able to narrate things.

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other texts which the readers can immediately access, or where the texts can be revealed progressively on multiple levels of detail.

According to the extract from Douglas, J. Yellowlees ‘The End of Books – Or Books Without End?’, he claimed that hypertext is as much a concept as it is a form of technology.
While developments of hypertexts may be fairly recent, it has actually existed for many decades.
The idea of hypertexts was actually born back in the thirties by Vannevar Brush. The creator, Vannevar Brush, believed that books and libraries were beginning to hinder research just as much as it was helping it. So, he created a Memex which stemmed from a belief that machines could model the processing of information by reproducing the neural structures in the brain that linked information together by association rather than by the linear logic of the printed book. Readers who used the Memex would be able to collect snippets of information from a huge variety of sources, linking them together with ‘trails’ and even inserting their own comments or notes.