The dawn of the Internet has not only changed the way we interact with each other, but also with how we interact with literature itself. Hypertexts, for instance, have enabled readers to go beyond the words that a writer has written on his/her page by relaying them into a plethora of links that they can continue to delve further and further into. This provides the reader with access to a nearly endless amount of information that may span reviews, commentaries, biographies, and even criticisms of the writer and his/her work, allowing them to go beyond initial text in ways that were never possible in the past.

However, while this resource may be useful in gaining a greater understanding of how people may interpret and feel about the initial text, it also serves to sever the connection that used to directly connect both the reader and the writer. This disassociation is due to the fact that while physical literature only gives reader access to the words printed on the page, digital literature provides additional material that spans beyond the writer’s original work. Thus the reader is no longer a just taking the writers word for granted, but analyzing and scrutinizing their work all through the work of others. In this way the reader is transformed from a passive participant, into an active one by becoming a sort of scholar of the writer. This is because he/she is no longer solely conversing with the writer, but with many other individuals from all over the world present on the Internet as well. These conversations provide the basis for an online community to thrive through debating, analyzing, and criticizing the original work in ways the writer never even intended. This is especially so if the writer is telling a story, as the readers perspective of the story is forever skewed and inspired by the different interpretations that these hypertexts can provide. Reddit, an online message board is one such example of these kinds of online communities present on the Internet today. On Reddit readers may create entire websites dedicated to a singular writer and to their work, allowing for conversation to take place long after a writers work has been published.

In addition to hypertexts, the collaborative and editable nature of the Internet also allows us to question the very permanence of digital literature. Wikipedia for example is a online collaborative encyclopedia. Thus, rather than the information being provided by one source, it is instead compiled by multiple sources all of which combine together to produce an article on a particular subject. Thus it is easy to imagine that the logical conclusion of this kind of cooperation could one day result in a very fluid kind of storytelling birthed from the collaborative nature of the Internet. This fluidity would then allow stories to no longer just stem from a singular voice,  but a cacophony of them, in which many people all come together to produce a story that may originate from cultures all around the world.