If Jane Austen could see what her book Pride and Prejudice has become on the World Wide Web, she would faint dead away. In the first five sentences, there are four invitations to go elsewhere. In our restless technological optimism, we tend to look down on old technologies as inferior, but we need to resist this. Some of the boring old linear technologies, including the one we're using right now, still ride on the cutting edge of human intelligence. The works of George Orwell, E.B. White, and Joan Didion read from beginning to end, not just because of the primitive tools these writers used.
Traditional narrative offers the reader a journey with a built-in purpose.
The progression of thought is specifically designed so that the reader may learn something, not just from the parts of the story, but also from the story as a whole. For all of its advantages, hyper-text has no whole. As the Web becomes integrated into the fabric of our lives, mostly to our great benefit, we should employ hyper-linking as a useful tool, but be careful not to let it govern the way we think.