Hypertext as Subversive?

Publication: Culture Machine 2, 2000.

An essay in hypertext form exploring the ways hypertext could deal with borders and walls in writing and academia. Universities are said to be places of critical discussion and evaluation that train new cognitive explorers, make better maps, and also create new territories for exploration. We are all familiar with the internal walls that limit that creativity. These walls may be implicit in the very idea of a university. Could hypertext linking help resist and subvert those walls, and undo what is too often the university’s one-way meta-position? This essay is self-referential: it works around a debate about whether media like itself are inevitably linked to processes of homogenization and oppression.