The Concluding Note Node

We have seen that there are indeed new definitions of the roles of the reader and writer, and how meaning can be seen as a reader’s production rather than totally under the writer’s control. This is a great paradigm shift from the traditional roles of the reader and writer in the print era. Besides changing roles and greater autonomy on the reader’s part, the writer is seen more as a designer in a network of texts, where his links have to bring out additional meaning not apparent in words alone.

However, it might be too early to celebrate the “success” of hypertext, for many texts are still more readerly than writerly. Moreover, many web-authors have not discovered the importance of links as a new form of rhetoric, but call any marked-up text hypertext. Thus, we see that hypertext has not reached the ideal state as envisioned by Landow.