Many of the authors of the essays in this book have since published scholarly collections of their own. In the process they substantiate a node in the technical-historical progression of cybertext. Despite an ongoing tendency to collapse hypertext and hypermedia into one entity, it is questionable whether or not they are the same. Complex texts which use images and other effects as conduits, as parts in a design or arrangement in language, are inherently different from text-only documents. Watching the day's news scroll by on letter display systems, or in the horizontally streaming light bulbs of Times Square is not the same as viewing it on a billboard-sized television across the street.
Images have a different impact when viewed than described in print.
New understandings of the rhetorical strategies and syntax are required when texts are hybridized in this way. What Landow avoids by this approach is taking responsibility for discussing whatever effects visual imagery have as a method of presentation, organization, and arranging language, how visuality alters the dynamics of text, and so on. In any case, practical manifestations of Nelson's vision of hypermedia now exist in Hypervideo , Virtual Poetry, Holopoetry, and other new appearances of new media poetry as it is introduced by Eduardo Kac in Visible Language 30.2 and elsewhere. Cited Critical Art Ensemble. The Electronic Disturbance .