hyperlife

It probably had to do with reading William Gibson's Spook Country—not that I liked it very much—but I dreamed of a new kind of book. You would read the book, and then at certain points be told to log into the web, where you would play a game, watch a film clip or read a Wikipedia entry. Sometimes, you would get a phone call or a text message in the context of a book. In my somnulent state, this struck me as a brilliant breakthrough concept.
Upon awakening, however, I realized that the medium already exists. We call it life. We go about our daily business, punctuated with telephone calls, googling something we read about in the newspaper, a cup of coffee, a photograph (like this one by a certain Spirit), e-mail, an IM—any of which can become a Choose-Your-Adventure story. I have even had people pop off the screen and become real characters: life, with hypertext.