"A more digitally sophisticated Web soap would exploit the archiving functions of the computer by salting each day's new episode with allusions (in the form of hot word links) to exciting previous installments. Our clicking would then be motivated not by curiosity about the media objects (show me a video clip) but by curiosity about the plot (why does she say that about him?). The computer presentation would thereby allow pleasures that are unattainable in broad cast soaps. For example, we could follow a single appealing subplot while ignoring the companion plots that may drive us crazy, or we could come in at any time in the story and review important past events in all their dramatic richness....

Some Web stories are already using such techniques, and no doubt all of them will in time. Their adoption is part of the inevitable process of moving away from the formats of older media and toward new conventions in order to satisfy the desires aroused by the digital environment. We are now engaged in thousands of such discoveries in all the subgenres of electronic narrative, the result of which will be the development of narrative pleasures intrinsic to cyberspace itself. Therefore, if we want to see beyond the current horizon of scrapbook multimedia, it is important first to identify the essential properties of digital environments, that is, the qualities comparable to the variability of the lens, the movability of the camera, and the editability of film, that will determine the distinctive power and form of a mature electronic narrative art. "