The memex would record the associations so they could be retraced or re-explored. Bush, we perceived, assumed that science and poetry work in essentially the same way. Each depends upon spatial metaphors for success. The spatiality of VR and, I have argued, its appeal in the popular imagination, is entrenched in the primacy it grants to bodily experience. The mapping of a familiar physical orientation onto unfamiliar systems of information literally transforms the digital into the tactile, reversing a process described by Baudrillard over a decade ago.
Hypertextual systems comprise a different kind of electronic experience.
Despite the move towards multimedia, hypertext remains rooted in the culture of the word. Descriptions of VR de-emphasize language in order to evoke a kinetic, phenomenologically heightened field of intense bodily movement and metamorphosis. In this version of the future, VR actually poses itself against language, and, ultimately, in its solipsistic focus on a solitary and disembodied subject adrift in the cyberdelic fields, against culture and history as well. In virtual reality, there's no question that your reality is created by you. Many writers, however, have correctly stressed the revelatory power of a medium that permits absolute control over the objective conditions of subject formation.