www.dichtung-digital.de/2000/Simanowski/27-Feb Index - Pref - Def - Coll Writing - Hyperfiction - Hypermedia: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 / Epilogue 5. Hypermedia Robert Coover, who announced the end of books in 1992, now complains in his essay "Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age" that digital literature is becoming more and more like movies. Concerning the multimedial web he states: "hypertext is now used more to access hypermedia as enhancements for more or less linear narratives […] the reader is commonly obliged now to enter the media-rich but ineluctable flow as directed by the author or authors: In a sense, it's back to the movies again, that most passive and imperious of forms." Coover notes the "constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle." What Coover points out is indeed an issue of hypermedia. If the problem of hyperfiction is to link without meaning, the problem of hypermedia is to employ effects that only flex the technical muscles. It is not enough to have nice images beside the words, or sound or fancy animation. It is important that those effects justify their existence by conveying a message. There are hundreds of examples that fail. I will give two that succeed. - next -