Rereading Bolter after about five years is a frightening experience. All of a sudden I realize that all of the ideas I've been playing with for the past three and a half years, the one's on which I've been breaking my tongue (or is it fingers?) to try and express in these pages, have all been eloquently committed to paper long before. Perhaps it's little more than a case of an idea whose time has come: Bolter's ideas have become so mainstream that we hardly see them as original because our experience of what is no longer a new medium has taught us what he was telling us without the need to read him. Yet there's still something rather daunting about discovering that you really don't have anything original to say about the subject - that it had all been said even before you started.
But something else gets called into question through rereading Bolter. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of the unavoidably reflective process of reading about reading, or perhaps it's the contextual result of trying to examine the world of hypertext, but whichever, I find myself creating inadvertent links on almost every sentence that I feel calls for elaboration. I start out intending to present a rather detached, objective review of the literature that pertains to hypertextual writing, and I discover that instead I'm compelled to make everything pass through the filter of the ever-developing nature of this network. Parts of this are thus unavoidably personal.
Of course the objective here wasn't really to say something original. Hypertext and the internet are highly repetitive media and there's no reason to really expect that new thoughts or insights are going to appear any more frequently in a discussion of them than anywhere else. Though I certainly can't object to perhaps having something, perhaps even slightly, original to say, my purpose here was not to show that the ideas that Bolter (along with others) raises are fascinating and convincing, but to examine whether their realization in an extended and functioning hypertextual framework can actually lead to a coherent whole that merits reading.