SELLING POSSIBILITIES - HYPERTEXT, FREEDOM, AND DIRECTION

Hypertext, in its most available manifestation, the World Wide Web, is being sold as a force for liberation. One must differentiate the vari eties of freedom to better understand how different interests manipula te the freedom mythology to achieve different ends. This study examine s the scholars who have framed the hypertext debate and the rhetoric e mployed by the companies that want to sell it to locate a more complex picture of how these interests use the freedom myth. Such considerati on leads to discussion of what might shape hypertext's emergence as mo re than an information-dispersal system.