It's not clear that on-paper textuality has exhausted its creative possibilities.
After all, it is not yet a thousand years old. As Elizabeth Eisenstein points out, on-paper printing is not a unifying technology at all: " Concepts relating to uniformity and to diversity -- to the typical and to the unique -- are interdependent, they represent two sides of the same coin. ... The more standardized the type, indeed, the more compelling the sense of an idiosyncratic personal self."
The on-paper text has a lot in common with hypertext in that it allows for a diverse range of practices within a set of fixed conventions. Hypertext allows for a new textuality in which some conventions -- the paper page, the author -- are replaced with other, original ones. Perhaps hypertext is a new set of textual conventions and not a new textual form.
M.R. Allen
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