Challenge or Opportunity- Exploring Emergence and Historical Development of Hyper textual Representations

Abstract

With the invention of digital technologies, the activity of reading has become highly dependent on the display of language in new contexts and new forms, and thus, new reading environments play their role in comprehension while enhancing the experience of the reader. Since new devices/machines are invented keeping in view their utility/productivity and the preferences of the users, so the application of digital hypertext using electronic medium might attribute quite new dimensions to studying language comprehensibility because of the change in language (re)presentation. Therefore, whether with the advent of digital texts the nature of comprehension in new language forms, gets modified or not is a researchable question to be explored and studied.The emergence of hypertext representation started an unending debate about the nature of hypertext per se and the way it enriches the interactive process of meaning making, and the phenomenon of comprehension of texts and their production. It is important to consider the nature of hypertext representation because it is concerned with its exclusive comprehension patterns unlike traditional book reading. The present review article is basically a critical study of literature regarding the emergence and historical development of hypertext.