The New York Times reported that one unidentified senior faculty member thought all the people affiliated with this venture were charlatans . Investing in a lunatic start-up at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was an inexpensive hedge. Thus we grew rapidly to three hundred people. In the words of George Landow and Paul Delany, two of the critics who bridge the area between the old literature and the new hypertext, the concepts of literary theory are virtually embodied in the new multimedia. Janet Murray is director of the Laboratory for advanced Technology in the Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Audiences already accept nonlinear story telling in various forms.
The computer is the right model for 20th-century thinking it allows shifting relationships between many elements. A kaleidoscopic narrative offers multiple points of view, multiple visions, multiple stories. This is the direction in which literature has been headed since the Renaissance. The written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader's imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you.