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. I'd argue that the reader continues to start, stop and otherwise organize the text by these very principles in order to produce a sense of unity or wholeness, but certainly textual authority has been displaced, if not obliterated. Descriptions of VR de-emphasize language in order to evoke a kinetic, phenomenologically heightened field of intense bodily movement and metamorphosis. In virtual reality, there's no question that your reality is created by you. If VR becomes an ontological testing ground, hypertext permits an exploration of some poststructural tenets.