In the last item, we jump from more mechanical matters to an observation on the power of hypertext to address a fundamental conflict between modernist and postmodernist poetics.
It is easy to reach out to the World Wide Web or within one's own hypertext files and create a link. The establishing of a link, however, in itself only sets up the possibility for meaning. The maker of the hypertext must mediate the link to turn that possibility into an actuality. The browser/reader then will be free to enter into that actuality or not; but the maker will have met the obligation to provide the choice.
A purposeful hypertext maker will say something about the reason for a link either before the jump or immediately after the jump.
This will have two consequences. One, it will help the reader/browser to know where the paths are going. Two, it will help the maker to think about the subject of the hypertext. The mechanical business of linking and jumping, in other words, provides a stimulus to substantive development of the concepts treated in the hypertext.
Links speak in their own voice. Their voice is signalled by the highlight or the little hand. These are enough to cue the reader/browser to act. You do not have to repeat the voice of the link. The new maker of hypertext may want to fill the screen with the highlighted phrase, "Click here." It should never appear anywhere in a hypertext. A link should flow out of the syntax of the text like a bird emerging from a nest.
The maker enriches a hypertext through the number of links. The more links there are, generally speaking, the more meaning. But links indiscriminately made can create not meaning but vertigo. The categorical structure conferred by the maker on the hypertext in the end will help organize and determine links. Each file (technically tagged a "lexia") should be conceived as the center of a congeries of thoughts. With that file as the focus, the maker should then seek to connect it meaningfully with as many other files, or lexia, as possible. The underlying categories that make up the hypertext and organize the files will have a powerful influence on the way a given file effloresces into links.
Hypertext is not all process. It is an engine for making meanings. The sheer visual luxury of the process, however, endangers the meaning, even as it makes it possible. The maker should construct the hypertext so as to favor meanings, not the luxurious brightness of the process. Fewer links with deeper conceptual relationships may make a more powerful hypertext than more links with shallower reasons for connecting. This maxim may seem to fly in the teeth of the preceding one. The artful hypertext maker must balance these seeming opposites.
Postmodern theorists, such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, tell us that in postmodernism, deep-structured relationships have disappeared. This has been the result of the loss of a sense of continuous time. It was in such a sense that the old liberal humanist self, with its fierce integrity, anchored. It was such a sense of time that conferred the psychic distance which made irony possible. With the "waning of affect" in the postmodern (Jameson's term), and the foregrounding of space at the expense of time, irony is reported to have died.
Hypertext has the capacity to rescue some of the subtleties of style presumed lost when the distancing powers in modernist sensibility atrophied. It allows you to use postmodern spatiality itself to recapture distance if not (temporal) depth. You gain that power through the electronic medium of the interconnecting files of the hypertext. Spatial distance is yours for the asking: just make it with a link.
Of course, it is necessary for the maker of critical distance to believe that it has a useful purpose in the postmodern climate. For those with the daring to try, hypertext composition may hold the key to reconstructing a poetics of irony, detachment, and ambiguity. Those familiar terms from high modernist style may seem alien in the hot climate of hyperspace. But we relish the notion, deliciously perverse, that hypertext--the quintessential manifestation of the postmodern--may be turned upon itself in order to overturn the hegemony of flat and depthless space that it has established. Less perversely, we might assert that hypertext could effect a grand rapprochement between a poetics of high modernism and a poetics of postmodernism. This would come about if a new kind of depth--in space rather than in time--found robust expression in hypertext. To be candid, we have not yet found admirable examples that could start the revolution.