Philosopher David Kolb has been asking interesting questions about the relationship between philosophy, a discipline that has traditionally relied heavily upon linear argumentation, and hypertext. In his print essay "Socrates in the Labyrinth," he considers what form philosophical writing in hypertext might take:
One could also object that my atttempt to find a new form of philosophical writing is misguided, for the old genres will not be able to maintain their boundaries in hypertext. But boundaries are not erased by hypertext; they are made permeable. Form and genre lose their presumed absoluteness in hypertext, but they do not dissolve into atomized text or bland mixtures. Rather, they stand in tension with other uses and other partial wholes. We have to learn from Hegel and Derrida that the choice is not between rigid boundaries and total flux.
I have been asking about philosophical hypertext works that are not libraries of articles or threads of discussion and argument. The latter are legitimate and straightforward uses of hypertext in philosophy, but they do not address the question I have been pursuing, which is whether there can be nonlinear philosophical works that may include argumentative lines as part of a different texture that takes advantage of the peculiar potentials of the hypertext medium. (338)