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= So what is hypertext? in the very simplest terms, it is a set of short texts and a system of links that lets us jump around among them in various sequences;
= Thus it is a web of meanings in which the nodes are usually short texts of the kind we are used to (though they can also include pictures and other media), but where the larger scale coherence of our experience of traversing or exploring the hypertext is a joint product of authorial suggestions and readerly choices and construals;
= Hypertext is thus not so different from many texts that we do not typically read straight through from start to finish, but dip into, or from book-like text objects that instruct us to read them in some non-canonical ways;
= What is fundamentally different is the MEDIUM, and I believe, with Roy Harris, G Landow, E Aarseth and many others, that medium, and perhaps our systemic notion of MODE, needs to be defined in relation to a technology of using texts, a organized social and cultural system of techno-practices, in which we make, circulate, and use object-texts and construe meaning-texts with them;