Wk 4, Q1: Impact of hypertext on the world

Reporting live from Changi Airport Terminal 2 Arrival Hall, in the thick of the action at the IMF-World Bank Boards of Governors Meeting, we reflect on the impact that hypertexts have had on the world.

Briefly speaking, there's probably more of a penchant towards instant gratification probably due to the fact that at the click of a mouse we are brought to a whole new chunk of text. Gone are the days when one takes joy in spending time in the library looking through the catalogue to locate books that would interest one and then proceed to the storage location to be greeted with the satisfaction of finding the book of one's desire. Nowadays, I find myself researching solely based on the internet and oftentimes when I can't find a reference in an electronic format, I would probably ignore it unless it is entirely essential to my research. This might also have had an effect on the times people choose to work in a way that since the information is available online 24 hours a day, people might tend to gravitate towards working later into the nights, but this would probably be seen as more of an impact of the internet than the hypertext.

In another sense, people are probably less focused in their thought processes since they impulsively jump from one section to another as and when they see a link that interests them. It might also have an impact on the writer's part in organizing their thoughts since hypertext allows for greater segregation amongst the individual components of the text. They might thus spend less time trying to write in a continuous, coherent sense. This might be reflected in a greater focus on individuality in the society since hypertext places such a great emphasis on personal choice and how the use of hypertexts emphasise the importance of individual elements rather than the composition of the whole.

This loss of emphasis in organization can be seen in the concept of searching for your mail espoused by Gmail whereby people are no longer encouraged to organize their mail in folders according to the origins of the mail. In a way, the search bar in Gmail might be seen as one master hypertext which will link one to any mails which contain the keywords that the user types in.