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hypertext virtues
While the more or less generic list of poststructural elements are all taken to be things that hypertext performs Bolter makes two rather interesting suggestions.
The first is that hypertext elevates the temporal element of texts into a key structural or formal feature, so that any hypertext necessarily embodies or requires a temporal dimension. It is read in time and time is important (unlike the book).
Secondly he suggests that the use of deconstruction in general, and in relation to hypertext, is a 'negative' theory. It tells us what hypertext is not, by demonstrating how hypertext is distinct from other forms of literature and literacy, but that what we need is a 'positive' theory of hypertext.
On the one hand this is an enviable desire, and something that probably fits (in ways that Bolter probably wouldn't have been aware of) with a much more contemporary theoretica practice. On the other hand it is derived from a rather banal reading of deconstruction where he ends up arguing that deconstruction probably doesn't have much to say about hypertext precisely because it is so fluid in relation to the traditional text. This is almost certainly a misreading of deconstruction.
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