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When I grew up in the 50s, reading and writing were activities conducted alone and in silence. Twenty years from now, as my grandchildren come of age, I expect these formerly solitary behaviors will be perceived as highly social - something we do, more often than not, with others. This insight comes in large part from a series of experiments conducted over the past five years with my colleagues at The Institute for the Future of the Book. They strongly suggest that when we move texts from the printed page to a networked screen, the social aspect of reading and writing moves to the foreground.

What I'm onto here is writing and researching and thinking about hypertext fiction. For those of you familiar with it already, enough said--you may want to go back to the Contents. For those of you unfamiliar with it, hypertext fiction (aka hyperfiction, interactive fiction, nonlinear fiction) is a new art form that while not necessarily made possible by the computer was certainly made feasible by it. Its creators make use of hypertext--of which the Web is only one widespread albeit limited incarnation--to create fiction with many features uncharacteristic of print fiction: multiple paths through the same text; multiple endings (and beginnings); questions posed to the reader which, once answered, influence what the reader will read; audiovisual attachments; navigable maps; and so on and so on. Readers seeking more extensive definitions of hypertext fiction are invited to browse through the Theory and Criticism section or, better yet, simply start reading a few works--artists always outstrip their would-be definers.

Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of this work. Streams of consciousness, and of data. Images of and references to rivers flow through the interface. Many of the texts I am inserting into the original twelve essays of TCR 2-50 refer to rivers and/or to writing. TCR 2-50 tackles a broad range of topics in the realm of new media and new technologies - from biotechnology to performance art - yet themes of writing and language are persistent throughout all the essays and thus form the focus of my response. The texts of TCR 250 are the raw data feeding this re-reading endeavour. Whatever the texts say or mean or refer to, as far as RSS is concerned they remain just that: texts

With hundreds of works of computer mediated fiction or poetry available either on disk, largely through the Eastgate Systems catalog, or on the net, hypernarrative, its definition as open-ended as the many-faceted reading experience it engenders, is a primary way of storytelling in the era of the World Wide Web.