With hyperfictions, this is different. They float on the monitor in self-contained screens, half covering, half covered by other windows: e-mail, writing, online-banking, phoning; parallel, equi-valent views into the clutter of my hard drive. Every single screen of a hyperfiction has to struggle against the pull of half a dozen other applications and every victory is as brief as the page it calls up. Reading comes across as hard work, every click an effort. And indeed, from day one, the euphoric accounts of how hypertext reconfigures our reading and writing habits (if "we" happen to be the fortunate few computer-literates of the Western world) were accompanied by complaints about the utter unreadability of this would-be embodiment of postmodern theory.
Tekka
