The use of digital media has dramatically changed the prerequisites for intertextuality.

Hyperlinks move the focus from one piece of text to another, and then to a third, and then to a picture, a video or a status update on Facebook. The distinctions between primary and secondary texts become blurred. What is at one moment a secondary text becomes primary and, in turn, relates to other texts. A mosaic of information elements replaces the traditional linear organization of the information, which is linked together using hyperlinks.

The world is digital. The future is portable.

The powerful search engines on the internet are valuable tools for turning implicit intertextuality into explicit. Google's overall goal is to collect and organize all information globally and make it available to everyone. You can find this philosophy at http://www.google.no. Click "All about Google". They do this by creating relationships between all the texts on the internet. Individual texts with no prior knowledge or relationship to each other are indexed and sorted, and the key to unlocking intertextuality is the word or phrase that you type in the search field. The result is a list where Google presents hyperlinks to relevant texts and retrieves metatext from the various pages to provide additional explanations.

The technology used on the internet has made hyperlinks commonplace for everyone. With the help of these, it is not only Google that creates the new intertextuality. Both professional writers, bloggers and millions of users on social media contribute daily. This work must necessarily have consequences for technical documentation as well. We cannot rely on paper, not even PDF in A4 format. The world is digital. The future is portable. And the screens are small.

New technology, new tools and new methodology have meant that what used to be traditional paper books now increasingly appear as interactive publications. In these, relationships are created between the texts by hyperlinking and reuse. These relationships, in turn, have meant that we gradually change how we read and write. Even if fictional prose still appears to be linear in all respects, non-fiction is gradually becoming more and more modular.

This applies not least to technical documentation.

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