Reading hypertext is a performative action that elides the traditional canons of origin, centre and finite dimensions of textuality. Lack of origin in hypertext represents its physicality as well as symbolizes the agency enacted by readers in the cyberspace to co-create ‘performative narratives’ defeating the diktats of the author. Readers, thus, become wreaders as they produce as well as consume, and their engagement with text defies teleological tenability. This article explores the hypertext reading performances of college students in the Indian news website www.timesofindia.com Of particular interest are the intertextual and interactive experiences of the students and their reading predicated on the substrate of the medium and its materiality. The visual data of students’ engagement with the website was analyzed using grounded theory. It reveals that interactive experiences of students resonated with intertextual phenomena across different spaces, genres and modalities and they appropriated texts imbricated into multimodal spaces to co-construct multilinear narratives.
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