Hipertexto <i>revisited</i>

Abstract

Digital technologies question the way of thinking the traditional book and originate new spaces of writing and reading, and new types of text. The theory of hypertext has been conceptualising these changes. We will try to demonstrate that this has different matrices, via an analysis of the work of Theodor H. Nelson and Douglas Engelbart and, based on these, of the opposition of “association” and “connection” and of hypertext as an authorial and literary tool and hypertext as a system of information retrieval, with, further, a reflection upon the situation of standalone hypertextual systems confronted by the emergence of the World Wide Web. Lastly, Luciano Floridi’s concept of infosphere – understood as a semantic space constituted by the totality of documents, agents and their operations – allows us to characterise a new ecology where homo informaticus belongs is an amphibian species, living simultaneously in the biosphere and the infosphere, implying the development of new reading skills through hybrid and multimodal semiotic fields.