The First Few Hypertext Stories

Both The University of the Yellow Wall Paper and The Body made great use of the hypertext-medium. The University of the Yellow Wall Paper tended to read in a random, disjunctive, way, very similar to "stream-of-conciousness" writing. The random ordering of thoughts (which is the precise opposite of what one should do on a business website) tends to mimic the way in which the brain works. Wierd, rambling, hypertext stories are a pretty good medium to describe a decent into insanity.

While I think the University of the Yellow Wall Paper accomplished its authors goals, I prefered the body. It had at least one element that Killian suggests: A home page that shows you all the places one can go. As a habitual linear reader, I like to have some vague idea of where the end is. While the initial picture isn't exactly a table of contents, it still gives the reader an impression of roughly how many pages there are. (I'm a little obsessive and have to read every single page.) This really helped me to enjoy the story. I also noticed that hypertext is a good medium for what basically amounts to a character sketch. 

Hypertext really gives an author an unlimited breadth to look at a story from, but at the same time tends to limit it temporally. (I've been thinking about what I could do with this medium) The author can examine a single event or moment from many different angles, but having many different sequential events becomes problematic. While The Heist became a bit confusing, as different things occured at different times, the body, which simply describes a character and her body as they exist at the moment the author writes them. The action is all flashback, and it doesn't really matter when the reader learns about it. I think this really made good use of hypertext.