Most contemporary hypertext theorists have continued to argue that hypertext technology enhances the reader’s control over the text and, by extension, control over knowledge. Thus, humanities-based hypertext theory, which has looked closely at literary hypertext and hypertext as an aid to literary study, holds as a fundamental tenet that hypertext is reader-centered or even ultra-reader-centered; it frees the reader from the author’s control, transforming the comparatively passive reader into an active reader-writer. Yet, this liberatory rhetoric is founded on the false dichotomy of the active writer/passive reader, when in fact, as reader-response theorists have demonstrated, reading even conventional print text is anything but a passive process. Nonetheless, hypertext reader-centeredness is typically associated with democratization and the dissemination of authorial power, as in Landow’s claim that a “fully implemented embodiment of a networked hypertext system [. . .] obviously creates empowered readers, ones who have more power relative both to the texts they read and to the authors of these texts than readers of print materials have” (273).

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