The force of the Internet, with all its far-reaching usefulness in the fields of education, communication and entertainment (amongst of course many other fields), has reconfigured the print media that we know so well. Not to mention its strong presence as a source of infinite information from topics ranging from health to entertainment and education, the future of the printed book is clearly threatened by the speed and efficiency of the Internet and its gargantuan powerhouse of knowledge and information.
My experience of reading a hyperfiction is wholly different from one of reading a printed book. The presence of hypertextual links allows me to go where I want to go at my own pace and according to my own interest. The flexibility of hypertext, in other words, is that it provides an "infinitely re-centerable system whose provisional point of focus depends upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader in yet another sense". (Landow, pg 11) I shape my own focus of reading. No longer am I confined only to reading what an author wants me to read. By choosing the links before me, my point of focus moves as I chose it to. .
In this way, definitely hypertext has created a new reader. The presence of hypertextual links that connect articles and information allows readers to create our own meanings with the choice of our links. As readers, we produce our own meaning from the texts before us. Our reading is our interpretation. .
However, the interpretation of these texts depends also upon our shared experiences as a community. Different pages brought up would mean different things to different people. To state a simple example, a community of English speakers allows us to communicate with one another through reading and writing. The production of meanings are after all "the property neither of fixed and stable texts nor of free and independent readers but of interpretive communities that are responsible both for the shape of a reader's activities and for the texts those activities produce".
