"What will almost-free software and proliferating content do to commercial markets for content? How will people -- writers, programmers, and artists -- be compensated for creating value? What business models will succeed in this foreign economy?" These are the questions Esther Dyson answers in her Wired treatise on intellectual property rights in cyberspace.

Those of us who grew up in the era of diagramming sentences (formal constructions of thoughts) know that the link between a subject and its verb or a verb and its direct object is different from the link between a verb and its indirect object or any noun or verb and its modifiers or any part of a sentence and its prepositions and conjunctions--which are primitive links, and each in themselves different from one another ("and" from "but" and "to" from "from")--and that, moreover, there is often a hierarchy of value implicit in these differences and continuing in rankings of modifiers, including modifying clauses, articles generally being at the bottom of the ladder. Diagramming that sentence I have just written would quickly reveal that complex hierarchy, and converting it into hypertext would require a variety of link types in order to give the contained thought any coherent readable structure. In our hyperfiction workshops at Brown we use a proprietary software (Eastgate System's "Storyspace") that recognizes at least a few link-type differences, including default links (window-to-window: assures the reader that every click will lead somewhere), text links (in all their varieties of text-to-window, window-to-text, text-to-text), footnote links (a bi-directional link, as they are called), guarded links (go here only if you have previously gone there, do not go here if you've been here before, etc.), partial image links (single images can be broken down into smaller elements with a variety of links out, depending on where within the image you click), etc., but the Net, generally hostile to text, uses only simplistic lateral text/image-to-window links, all links out of a given window seemingly equal and the same, reducing thought to randomness and structureless incoherence. It is difficult to do anything BUT surf on the Net, and surfing is not thinking. To take but one elemental example: the default or window-to-window link. This link takes the reader from any part of a window to the "next" window, somewhat in the manner of paragraphs succeeding paragraphs in linear printed texts, with all other links (the kind that would be bright red or blue in Net texts) given priority over the default link (unless guard fields are being used). The sentence I have just written, minus its parentheses, would link to the sentence I am writing now, unless the reader clicked on "other links" or "given priority over the default link," in which case a footnote link would call up what is now in parentheses and (probably) return the reader to the original sentence, though the secondary thoughts of each may continue to be developed (highlight irritants, the reduction of text on the Net to graphics, the complexities and uses of guard fields, etc.) In addition, there could be lateral links out to illustrations or to arguments or thoughts different from the one in this sentence: a how-to window, for example, or the question whether default links merely perpetuate the limitations of printbound linearity. Hyperfiction seems to demand this variety of links and tends to be much diminished when it moves from the proprietary software out onto the Net. Fictional structures sometimes resemble the structures of logical or nonfictional descriptive thought, but they are not the same and often set out to subvert those structures, found to be limited and even purblind and repressive, which is one reason for the great appeal of hypertext to many authors. But structureless fiction is as unreadable as structureless thought, and the present primitive linking systems tend to reduce most attempts at fiction to commonplace books, or merely additive texts, readable in any order. That is to say, just another form of printbound literature, and one of the less interesting ones. In such an unstructured space, the reader is not empowered (as the hype goes), but left powerless and adrift. I might add the note that link variety is more obvious to the writer (a better set of tools) but more useful to the reader.

Visit the Storyspace page from Eastgate Systems to learn about this "writing environment" for "serious hypertext," or download a sample here.