Both an author's tool and a reader's medium, a hypertext document system allows authors or groups of authors to link information together, create paths through a corpus of related material, annotate existing texts, and create notes that point readers to either bibliographic data or the body of the referenced text. . . . Readers can browse through linked, cross-referenced, annotated texts in an orderly but nonsequential manner.

Roland Barthes

 

 

We are becoming more and more accustomed to this idea as we do things like channel surfing the television, writing short e-mails, or listening to a series of messages from different people on an answering machine. Electronic reference makes it possible to ascertain information in interwoven bits. One does not read the net from 'cover to cover'.