1015 HYPERTEXT AS SUBVERSIVE?

The text itself performs what it proposes. It disperses, leaks, resists containment. Kolb’s question, whether hypertext can be subversive, isn’t simply academic. It’s a question about power and structure, about how knowledge is shaped by the architecture that holds it. I think of resistance here not as an act of confrontation but as a quiet refusal to align with linearity, perhaps a rebellion of form. Hypertext splinters the traditional essay’s single thread into multiple pathways, exposing how knowledge doesn’t just unfold, but branches. It unsettles authority by forcing the reader into an active role, no longer a passive receiver but a navigator, a co-constructor of meaning.

But Kolb also recognizes the paradox that to claim resistance through hypertext, one must first design its structure. That design, however open, still imposes decisions such as where to link, what to reveal, what to hide. Subversion becomes fragile, always shadowed by the systems it seeks to disrupt. I thought about my own practice, how my works often oscillate between control and surrender, between systems and chaos. The circuit diagrams, the coded triggers, the interactive interfaces, they all rely on some degree of structure, yet I want them to breathe, to break, to resist being closed. Kolb’s hypertext feels like that moment when a system begins to blur at its edges, when the map no longer guarantees the territory. Perhaps the real subversion, then, lies not in escaping structure but in revealing its seams. Hypertext, like any living network, resists by showing how fragile order really is, how meaning is always contingent, rewired by every click, every choice. I see this resistance as an attitude, a pulse that hums beneath the surface of digital culture. To write, link, and think otherwise.