The Future of Hypertext
Another potential social problem is the long-term effects of nonsequentiality. Large parts of our culture have the built-in assumption that people read things in a linear order and that it makes sense to ask people to read “from page 100 to 150.” For example, that is how one gives reading assignments to students. With a hypertext-based syllabus students may show up at exam time and complain about one of the questions because they never found any information about it in the assigned reading.