Reducing Information Overload: a Comparative Study of Hypertext Systems

1. When Vannevar Bush envisioned his hypertext 'memex' in 1945 [Bush 1945], he dreamed of a personal system that would help him tackle the problem of information overload at that time. Today, with the advent of more and more powerful computers, we are still struggling to cope with the vast amount of information that bombards us daily. Perhaps hypertext technology, structuring traditional text into non-sequential text, is a viable solution to help us cope with the problem of information overload? [Go to Para 3]. In hypertext systems, we are provided with a powerful, flexible mechanism to browse non-sequentially via a network of richly connected nodes and links, and extract only that part of the information that is relevant to us. The same usability issues arise in multimedia, hypermedia and World Wide Web, and we will call them all "hypertexts" for conciseness. [Go to Para 2].