My focus is a reconfiguration of the intimate relation between reader and text. Let me begin, if I may, with an observation. Texts are, in a sense, intrinsically linear. We read sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. What texts seek to convey, though, is not linear, or is not linear in quite the same sense.
Texts seek by a sequence of words to convey a mode of understanding.
Such states of mind may, and often do, include or presuppose a series of more or less linear arguments, but ordinarily will include them as constitutive parts of larger and more complicated patterns, and often employ them in at least partly affective or ironized ways which to greater or lesser degree compromise and complicate even such seeming linearity as they bear by virtue of being explicit and sequential arguments. The text, phrase by phrase and word by word, seeks to weave the web in the mind of reader. The web itself, though, is not linear. It is reticular. That, I will argue, is what information technology can begin to do.