Bolter (WM 75-81)

• codex (from Latin "tree trunk"; "code" of laws)
• rubrication ("red letter day")
• saccadic (eye-jumps; not struggling letter-by-letter through a word)
• readan (OE "interpret, advise")
• lego (Fr & It root for "reading" -- lecture; "to collect," to pick up while navigating a physical space)
• boustrophedan ("as the ox turns")

• paratactic
  
• periodic

Bolter, an early hypertext theorist, argues that "The Homeric oral poetry shows that the network is older than writing itself" (81). 

Hypertext offers multiple paths through a text; two different hypertext readers could take different paths through the same text, just as auditors at two different performances by classical poet-storytellers could experience two different versions of the same epic legend. The fact that the reader of a hypertext could make choices that resembled the kind of choices the poet-performer could take was part of much of the hypertext theory of the 90s.  Of course, a the reader of a hypertext story can only choose to follow the hyperlinks the author has chosen to provide, whereas a bard has much more free reign to extemporize. 

So the author of a hypertext does have the same kind of freedom as the performer of an oral epic.  The reader of a hypertext can construct an individual path through a hypertext, while one audience member in a crowd is only one potential voice in what the crowd wants to hear next.