I've been a bit of a technogeek since I was a little kid, and despite this most of the attempts at serious web-based writing have always fallen short for me. I mostly wrote it off as simple snobbery but Hayles makes a really good point about what's really lacking in those experimental texts: voice. She relates a talk given by Robert Coover, one of the most successful writers of cybertexts, in which he said the age of digital literature had come and gone, and it was now in a straight downward spiral. She talked to him several months later, and he had this to say about the talk: "He explained that for him
literature was about the voice of the writer, and he feared that voice was being overwhelmed by the very developments that seemed so exciting to Kay."

This seems to me one of the essential problems that writers of cybertexts have to face. Because they're able to draw from such a diverse range of material (pretty much anything, really), they often do draw from a huge range of sources, and it seems like the desire to show off new technologies would probably increase the temptation of writer/artists to do this. Based on my experience with cybertexts, this is often the case, and it's very easy for all the technology to overwhelm the attempt at forming some sense of cohesion within the work.

This problem is not unique to the medium, however, and I think it's possible, even likely that it will be solved soon. Printed texts, because they're (generally) intended to be read from one page to the next, allow a cohesive voice, or voices, to form. Likewise with movies; though they're much more involved than printed books technologically, it's usually very easy to spot, say, a Stanley Kubrick film within the first few minutes. Perhaps the best comparison would be to digitally animated movies; when they first came out, they were often criticized for being sterile and unfeeling but over time several companies, Pixar and Dreamworks for example, have been able to make CGI
films that can be judged solely on their artistic merits.

The other part of the equation, and it's a very important one, is the audience. At this point in time, the audience for a work of this type is quite small given that the Internet to most people means email, news, weather, and pornography. As the audience becomes more sophisticated and more used to the rules of the medium, they'll gradually become better able to appreciate attempts at serious artistic attempts on the medium. Ulysses is probably the best comparison here, as the book was completely unintelligible to most contemporary readers, but it hinted at directions other people could follow.

-Stephen