Interactive digital environment: A symbiosis of hypertext fiction and reader

Abstract

In 1965, when Theodore Nelson and Douglas Engelbart developed Vannevar Bush’s idea of an efficient information retrieval device called Memex and coined the term “hypertext,” least did they realize that the revolutionary system would result in radical changes to human thoughts from the production of texts and its form to the reading experience of these electronic texts in the digital platform. The purpose of this paper is to account for multiplicity of readings in interactive narrative structure of hypertext fiction and its comparison to that of linear printed text. Additionally, this study involves changing role of a reader which is reinforced in an interactive environment while navigating narrative structures of hypertext fictions.