At these times, hypertextual writing can free one to explore the workings of one's inner self much more readily than linear forms of writing ever can. You are free to go where the mind wants to go, where natural thought will lead you. What matters most is the need of an active mind to come to grips with the infinite tangential avenues that it confronts when engaged in difficult reading and thinking. To restrict such thinking to linear forms and to hammer its results into carefully crafted, rational statements of cause and effect destroys the very process itself. Still, when all is said and done, we want people to share in this process of intellectual discovery upon which we so excitedly embark, and the most commonly shared form of doing so is the written word laid out in a hierarchical, linear format that is easily digested by our readers.
Linear writing is good for readers, but makes the act of writing twice as difficult as it has to be.
Perhaps with this new technology we have found a way for both readers and writers to have their day in a digital space where they can interact on common ground without sacrificing the needs most essential to the other. I have no ready answer to the myriad questions I have raised in this essay. I only know that the acts of reading and writing are changing with these new technologies, and whether this is good or bad is a question we really shouldn't be asking ourselves, for we can no more return to past illusions of textual linearity than we can stop the digital revolution itself. What we should be asking ourselves instead is how writing, indeed all of human communication, is changing. Only after answering this question can we begin to determine what is being lost and what is being gained.