The reason I drew the line at electronic stuff was to draw a distinction between conceptual hypertext--which Bush argued, pretty much, that all thinking was--and hypertext made more literal, that is, a technology which lets readers and writers generate paths which mimic, but really in a pale way, the kinds of associative thinking people do all the time. For the sake of discussion, we can posit that everything's hypertextual, always was and has been, which, in fact, was some of the early rhetoric from Landow if I remember right. But I think there are *qualitative and quantitative* differences between that conceptual model and the electronic model. I think in many ways the electronic model is a poor imitation of what the conceptual model allows, that the combination of limits and limitlessness in something like James Joyce's _Ulyssess_, which has a fixed number of pages, say, but a structure and allusions that can reverberate forever, is much *more* hypertextual for a reader than say, _Victory Garden_, which urges certain links and connections by providing them.
A hypertext link, in a poem say, does suggest more importance than the unlinked word in some cases simply because it takes *more* effort to create a link than to not (which may be why so much of what's on the web feels linear). A user might assume, by the presence of the link, that the word and link mean more the word(s) alone, that there's more to it. So the link becomes a persuasive tool, a come hither and go this way tool, which forestalls the reader going her own way, if she follows the links. If she ignores them, that's another matter, but since the link is priveleged, then, hypertext might a be tool that offers less to the imagination.
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Nick Carbone, Writing Center Director
CSU Writing Center (http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/WritingCenter)
