More than just a revolutionary tool for indexing, analyzing, or transmitting content, digital technology is actually reshaping the creation of art and literature. "Just as film emerged as the dominant artistic medium of the 20th century, the digital domain-- whether it is used for visual art, music, literature or some other expressive genre -- will be the primary medium of the 21st," wrote New York Times columnist Matthew Mirapaul in early 1999. More and more writers, artists, and musicians are using computers and the Internet to enhance, animate, or completely remake their art, with unconventional and remarkable results.
Publishing, a print-based business that to some people is beginning to represent the past, is attempting to adapt to the new digital world. Marc Aronson, a senior children’s book editor at the publishing house Henry Holt and a longtime student of the impact of changing technology on publishing, describes this impact as a kind of blurring or hybridization. "The keynote of the digital age is overlap, multiplicity, synergy. The digital does not replace print, it subsumes it," Aronson said. "Print becomes a form of the digital, just as the digital has a special place when it appears in print." Especially in books for young people, he notes, more authors and artists are trying books with multiple story lines or told from various points of view.
One strain of this new type of nonlinear writing is popularly known as hypertext fiction. At its simplest, hypertext fiction mimics the Choose Your Own Adventure books that became popular in the early 1980s. In these books, readers directed the story by choosing which page to turn to at key points based on what they wanted the character to do. In hypertext fiction, the reader explores different branches of a story on a computer by clicking on hyperlinks in the text. The result is a fragmented, slightly surreal narrative in which time is not linear and there is no obvious conclusion.
Michael Joyce, a professor of English at Vassar, is a leading theoretician and author of hypertext fiction. He wrote what is widely considered the first major work of hypertext fiction, afternoon, a story (1990). The piece consists of more than 500 different screens, or pages, which are connected by more than 900 links, afternoon centers on a man who witnesses a serious car accident that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and son, who may or may not have survived. Joyce has also published Twilight, A Symphony (1996), about a man estranged from his wife who is on the run with their infant son.
Joyce defines hypertext fiction as "stories that change each time you read them." He notes that "interactive narrative does not necessarily mean multiple plot lines, but can also mean exploring the multiple thematic lines or contours of a story. "
Not surprisingly, hypertext has frequently come under attack from traditional critics. Perhaps the most powerfully simple critique, however, comes from Charles Platt, a contributing editor for Wired magazine and a prominent science-fiction writer and critic. "Could it be," wonders Platt, "that storytelling really doesn’t work very well if the user can interfere with it" People really want the author, scriptwriter, or actors to do the heavy lifting of narrative, he argues. On the other hand, Platt suspects that we have hardly begun to explore true interactive media and that it will be utterly different from fiction as we know it today.
All the following are the characteristics of hypertext fiction EXCEPT that