While we commonly assign great importance on successes in technological advances, particularly in academic hypertext projects/theories, the failures prove far more beneficial. Exploring these failures is what helps us to better understand the strengths and differences between practical and theoretical Part of the reason failures are less explored is due to the Darwinian evolutionary model that is applied to them; people don’t want to touch things that don’t work properly, so investors and researchers are tacitly encouraged to ardently support the positive values in their projects (researchers lose funding when they crank out projects that fail).

Academically, traditions should be eschewed in favor of questioning, why? in the case of successful or disastrous projects, before failure or success can even be judged. Sir Karl Popper pointed out the fluid state of knowledge, which is easily applied to literature, since people generally believe that the world of writing is changing right now. If the world of literature is evolving, it must be progressively becoming more intricate, practical, fluid, and specialized; it must improve writing so that the changes are lauded. This of course has important ramifications for hypertext projects.

Changes aren’t always good, so it’s important to question them as they arise, but the questions need to be designed well, and specifically (like in the case of digital text projects), both conceptually, and practically. For example, hypertext theory, even when limited to its literary relations, is an extremely diverse field that is still sorting itself out amidst other more specified areas. A method for determining hypertext genre can be taken from Popper: theoretical literary statements should be supported with empirical data and logic (theories), and must be fallible to be considered scientific.

In both sciences and humanities, failure is not appreciated because it does not yield a marketable product. In actuality, more difficult, fallible projects should be selected over simplistic ones. Science seeks to explain data to the best of its ability (not to generalize), and hypertext theory should share this goal. Popper believed that reality was composed of multiplicities, and that science’s purpose was to explore inside of them. Predictions, with an impetus for testing and refutation is the core of science.

These notions can be applied in the literary world; theories should inspire argument, create new ideas, observations, and speculations, and allow new things to be done. Theories may find success because they’re persuasive, but persuasiveness is easily influenced by majority rule. This is why it’s important to ensure that hypertext theory relies on claims at an epistemological level, hypertext projects should rely more on use of theory and discussable results or goals, and should declare the terms of their success or failure. A project should use a methodology that can be explained in general terms to solve the problem it addresses, but is free to revise that methodology as it progresses and more things are considered. A lack of changes in method may indicate a lack of a problem. Hypertext projects tend to neglect to document alterations in methodology. Popper believed, solutions to problems should create new problems, because knowledge is finite but ignorance is not. It’s important to keep this concept in mind, as the solutions in a project should be broadly applicable.

We are at an important moment of change in writing, and while successful projects will self perpetuate, poorly documented failures will be difficult to reproduce, and more valuable in the future.