THE TEXT IS DEAD; LONG LIVE THE TECHST
by
EDWARD M. JENNINGS
Department of English
State University of New York at Albany
_Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.3 (May, 1992)
Copyright (c) 1992 by Edward M. Jennings, all rights
reserved. This text may be freely shared among
individuals, but it may not be republished in any
medium without express written consent from the author
and advance notification of the editors.
Review of:
Landow, George P. _Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology_.
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
[1] This is a review of George P. Landow's book about a
phenomenon almost as outlandish in a paper-based culture as
scripture must appear to be when it arrives in societies
without records. _Hypertext: The Convergence of
Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology_ is part of a
series called "Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society."
Steven G. Nichols, Gerald Prince, and Wendy Steiner are the
series editors. I think it is a marvelous book, and this
essay is meant to prod you into reading it from cover to
cover.
[2] _Hypertext_ could be the keystone volume in a graduate
curriculum where the rhetorics of networking and screen
display are scrutinized right beside those of oral and
scribal modes, of scroll and codex technologies. But at
least four audiences may still be hostile to it: Curmudgeons
who don't know which upsets them more, critical theory or
technology; closet word-processors for whom the concept
"programming" still smacks of mind control; theorists for
whom Barthes and Derrida and Lyotard are old wallpaper
against which background some significant struggles are (at
last) taking place; and technophiles ashamed of their access
to tools that others cannot afford.
[3] The book itself is not a menace, but the technologies
it celebrates--or the still unexplored opportunities offered
by the hypertext technology--threaten assumptions so deeply
held that most people will deny that they can be challenged.
After all, these words mean what they mean, don't they?
Text.
Author.
Story.
Knowledge.
[4] Landow himself issues no directly apocalyptic
challenges. No foam around his mouth. His presentation is
measured, experiential, lucid, moderate and sensible. He
merely points out that the *concept* "hypertext" lets us
test some concepts associated with critical theory, and
gracefully shows how the technology is contributing to
reconfigurations of text, author, narrative and (literary)
education.
[5] As an advocate for the technology Landow describes so
clearly, my goal in this review is to tell you enough about
it so that you will feel compelled at least to read
_Hypertext_, even if you don't rush out and invest all at
once in the electronic paraphernalia you would need to
become acculturated. I will try to describe the phenomenon,
and then try to suggest how hypertext demands that we
re-place those four self-evident terms. As I perceive it,
the technology undermines fundamental assumptions about
authority and control of time.
[6] Just what is this "thing," this "concept," this
technology that has acquired the label "hypertext"? Landow
does a good job of explaining it, as do Bolter and Moulthrop
and Slatin (emphasizing "Storyspace"), but it's like trying
to describe digital recording to Oscar Wilde or trying to
help a fish understand "breathing." Even readers of _PMC_
need help, I suspect, in spite of their acquaintance with at
least two other transforming technologies, word-processing
and networking. Not everyone has easy access to the
relatively expensive Macintosh platform where most of the
writer-artist hypertext software performs.
[7] Please note: We are *not* discussing the ballyhooed
"multimedia" here, nor the pseudo-hypertext built in to the
"Help Menus" of commercial software applications. My own
experience (limited) is with Eastgate Systems' "Storyspace"
(and a few hours with Ntergade's "Black Magic," and a few
minutes with Knowledge Garden's "Knowledge Pro"). George
Landow, in sharp contrast, has designed and experienced
entire "docuverses" in the "Intermedia" environment
developed and installed at Brown University. He has
practiced what he preaches, that is. What's more, he and
Paul Delany have already edited _Hypermedia and Literary
Studies_ (MIT, 1991), 17 essays whose cluster of
perspectives supplements and qualifies the authoritative
focus of his 1992 monotext being reviewed here.
[8] Once more, then: What "is" hypertext?
[9] It can be imagined as an endless electronic nesting of
"footnotes," each one enriching all the others, none of them
secondary even though one had to be encountered first. You
can place them whenever you want, in whichever typeface (or
"tone") you choose, and with whatever coloration you prefer.
[10] Another image is of a book's index accompanied by a
pointer that would let readers wander from one reference to
another without having to keep their index finger between
index pages. The sequence of assimilation--associative or
whimsical or undeviatingly purposeful--rests in the digits
of the reader.
[11] A third image starts with pictures, not books. Imagine
a handful of cubes connected by straws, a cluster that
almost resembles those models of molecules that illustrate
articles in _National Geographic_. These cubes are "lexias
or blocks of text" (Landow 52). The straws are electronic
links. Hypertext is nothing more than electronically
connected chunks of text.
[12] Expand the imaginary handful into a roomful. Consider
that those little cubes are not *word* containers, but
receptacles holding whole sentences, paragraphs, scenes,
speeches--or photographs, diagrams, songs, symphonies,
videotapes of vaudeville acts with barking dogs....
Consider also that those straws, now enlarged to tunnel
size, can arch from one corner of the room to another
without going through all the neighboring cubes along the
way. The designer lays out the linkages. Instead of a neat
model molecule, all primary colors and straight lines, we
have a web, a Gibsonian Matrix, an elecTRONic habitat.
[13] As "readers" of this space, we who have entered the
habitat's first chamber take our seats and watch the
message-performance composed for us. Finished, we take a
hint from the options posted on the wall and stroll--
together or separately, next door or to the far reaches--
stopping off anywhen that looks promising.
[14] The crux of hypertext is where those *spatially*
distinct "cubes" intersect with *temporally* distinct
sequences. Authors compose the cubes.lexias.performances
and construct the tunnels.web.links. The audience, having
entered the space at cube one, has to choose where to
explore next, and has to endure the consequences of the
risks implicated in that choosing.
[15] So much for telling fish about breathing. Instead of
holding a book, we look at a screen displaying a map of an
Index. By now, two of those self-evident terms, "text" and
"author," no longer mean quite what they used to. Instead
of being sentences and paragraphs and two-dimensional pages
bound as a book or journal or newsletter, what we "read" is
distinct, self-contained chunks of performance frozen in a
three-dimensional "space."
[16] As it happens, two of Landow's chapters are about
reconfiguring the text and reconfiguring the author, so we
have not strayed too far from his (two-dimensional) text.
Another pair of his chapters has to do with narrative and
education, so I will have a chance to show how hypertext
technology can question "story" (the morality of narrative)
and "knowledge" (construct versus instruct) later in this
essay. Meanwhile, I trust that the convergence Landow
writes about between computer technology and critical theory
is beginning to sound plausible and interesting. His own
Index (if displayed on your screen) would show about 75
citations for Barthes and Derrida. Foucault, Lyotard,
Bakhtin, Miller and four others together match that number.
Vannevar Bush leads the techies with 15 citations; Theodor
H. Nelson (14) and Jay David Bolter (12) outpoint McLuhan,
Ong, Joyce (Michael) and Moulthrop.
[17] After a glance at Landow's first chapter, about theory,
then, I shall cycle through more modulations of
writer-reader-text dislocation, stressing control of time
and sequence, and press on to try to legitimize narrative
disorder.
[18] The first chapter, "Hypertext and Literary Theory," is
for me a clear, succinct and persuasive elaboration of the
argument that hypertext actually concretizes a lot of what
poststructuralism theorizes. Landow himself is not so
insistent. His moderate claim: "What is perhaps most
interesting about hypertext . . . is not that it may fulfill
certain claims of structuralist and poststructuralist
criticism but that it provides a rich means of testing them"
(11). Some nexial terms in the early pages are
inter-textuality, multi-vocality, de-centering and
non-linearity. Central to the "convergence" argument is the
quasi-equation of techie Nelson's "text chunks" and critic
Barthes's *lexia*: "Hypertext . . . denotes blocks of
text--what Barthes terms a %lexia%--and the electronic links
that join them" (4).
[19] Landow finishes this first chapter in the context of
Alvin Kernan's thesis that printing technology virtually
created the concepts of "authorial property, authorial
uniqueness, and physically isolated text." The book, the
artist, and even "intellectual property" are fragile,
socially constructed phenomena. Landow predicts that
hypertext will, in its turn, frame and historicize several
such heretofore "self-evident" Truths about Art. Hypertext
technology thus "has much in common with some major points
of contemporary literary and semiological theory,
particularly with Derrida's emphasis on de-centering and
Barthes's conception of the readerly versus the writerly
text" (33-4; see also Kernan, _Printing Technology_).
[20] Even though Landow concentrates on ways that hypertext
reconfigures text and author, the role of Reader is
inseperable from both, and I shall emphasize the paradox of
that role: The reader is no longer subjected totally to the
authoritative will of a single mind, and the reader can be a
collaborating writer within the hypertext space. BUT each
new reader IS still under the previous reader-writer's
control, and NO reader can tamper with the lexias already in
place.
[21] There are two ways to unravel these apparent
contradictions. The first involves a digression into the
way two mutually exclusive words are being juxtaposed. Here
is Landow on writer and reader:
Today when we consider reading and writing, we
probably think of them as serial processes or as
procedures carried out intermittently by the same
person: first one reads, then one writes, and then
one reads some more. Hypertext, which creates an
active, even intrusive reader, carries this
convergence of activities one step closer to
completion; but, in so doing, it infringes upon
the power of the writer, removing some of it and
granting it to the reader. (71)
Notice how comfortably familiar this terminology is--power,
writer, reader--even though juxtapositions of
dominance-subservience relationships ("power") and
conventionally self-evident labels ("reader" and "writer")
are moderately disconcerting. We are accustomed to assuming
that "the reader" cannot be the same individual as "the
writer," that the practices are mutually exclusive. When I
write, that is, I am "by definition" not reading. As
Landow's account here indicates, it is difficult not to
reproduce this distinction terminologically, even where its
inadequacy as regards the hypertext becomes clear. To
capture what really goes on in hypertextual pactice we will
need to develop a new vocabulary capable of signifying such
concepts as "wreading" and "wriding." (And my "readers"
should be warned that I have engaged in some terminological
experimentation along these lines below, grotesque though
the results may be.)
[22] In any case, it would seem that the hypertext
environment brings about a collapsing of the identities of
composer and audience, a relinquishment of creative control,
a triumph of the consumer. But it is necessary to back
somewhat away from these implications and return to the
image of a space full of chambers connected by tunnels.
Within Landow's Intermedia technology and my chamber-tunnel
image, the "writer" carries out two tasks: preparing the
separate lexias in their chambers and installing the first
set of tunnels linking them. That design process is
creative and authoritative in traditional ways. "Readers"
needn't be privileged to tamper with what the "writer" has
installed. And the relationships among the lexias, the
links, are--when imagined as existing in space--determined
by the writer, and must be "followed" by the reader. Writer
and reader are not identical. There is no aleatoric
"audience participation," no wresting of control from the
performance artist.
[23] In that case, how can it be said that the technology
"infringes upon the power of the writer, removing some of it
and granting it to the reader"? First, the person who
enters the hypertext space may construct chambers and link
them to those already there. Thus the "wreader" gambit.
You can compose your objection to these sentences, or your
qualification, or even your endorsement, and "file" it in
the same size type--ah, where?--Think of the position as
"right behind" this screen/plane, visible the way the
labelled edge of a Mac window could be visible.
[24] That privilege of reader-being-writer is more easily
imagined, but may be less important, than the consequence of
the other "transfer of power" effected by the technology.
This involves the disintegration of the celebrated essence
of literacy, "linearity." I don't mean to imply a mandate
for chaos; the originator still can design a preferred
sequence for the readers' encounter with the lexias. And
sentence-level linearity is not eroded (nor is frame-level
pictorial syntax, nor a melody's phrasing). But the
reader-audience-explorer is no longer bound by sequences of
paragraphs or chapters. At the granular level we usually
call "organizational," the writer loses what had been almost
complete control over the reader.
[25] Before hypertext, that is, author(ities) designed the
one-and-only-one sequence of sensation-chunks to be imposed
on and shared by all (subservient) readers. The order in
which memories were layered, the sequence of admonitory
qualifications and concluding caveats was determined by the
single creative mind. A rebellious reader who flipped
casually from back to front, or read the "last" chapter
first, or started with the Index, was a social deviant.
Now, however, "Flipping back and forth" is no longer
defiant. It's encouraged. The authority can no longer
presume that everyone will have read "the same book," and it
won't be easy for two readers to discuss their differently
based interpretations of the same work. They might be
similar, but congruence would be an unlikely accident. The
author or wrider still influences, but no longer determines,
the way the reader or wreader spends time.
[26] For hypertext generally, then: The wreader can add to a
hypertext docuverse, but (usually) cannot alter its existing
lexia; the wrider maintains authority over the original
lexias and links, but abdicates control over sequence and
boundary. With that paradox and transformation outlined for
the technology in general, we can turn to a slightly
restricted arena, narrative. Hypertext affects
storytelling.
[27] If the relationship between wrider and wreader has been
transformed, if no single individual is responsible for the
whole text, and if that text is no longer a fixed, sacred
record--what then are the implications for morality in a
record-addicted, legalistic, guilt-needing culture? This
might seem like an impertinent question, except that the
following sentence is as provocative as any in Landow's
chapter called Reconfiguring Narrative: "Since some
narratologists claim that morality ultimately depends upon
the unity and coherence of a fixed linear text, one wonders
if hypertext can convey morality in any significant form or
if it is condemned to an essential triviality" (106).
Landow's answer is affirmative; hypertext storytelling can
"convey morality," and his argument here is consistent with
his other positions. Using Michael Joyce's hypertext
_Afternoon_ as his example, Landow maneuvers some
responsibility onto the reader's shoulders. As readers, he
says, "our assistance in the storytelling or storymaking is
not entirely or even particularly random . . . we do become
reader-authors and help tell the tale we read."
[28] "Nonetheless," he continues, "as J. Hillis Miller
points out, we cannot help ourselves: we must create meaning
as we read: 'A story is readable because it can be organized
as a causal chain . . . . A causal sequence is always an
implicit narrative'" (115; Miller, _Versions of Pygmalion_).
[29] One purpose of Landow's argument here seems to be to
rescue hypertext "stories" (and perhaps the medium itself)
from "essential triviality." But I don't think the rescue
operation is called for. The struggle is not between the
trivial and the serious, or between absurdity and order,
even though Miller (and Aristotle) implies that the absence
of centralized, authorial control of time, and the
concomitant absence of obvious causes and necessities, would
leave hypertext vulnerable to the defamatory epithets
"random" and "chaotic." I see randomness and chaos making a
comeback, however, and if morality's principal basis really
is sequence--consequence, _post hoc ergo propter hoc_,
narrative--then I believe that conventional "morality,"
thermodynamic morality, is in for a hard time.
[30] My conviction is founded in the implications of
fractals and chaos theory, which permit the simultaneous
domination of events by absolute determinism and absolute
uncertainty. I do not expect "causality" to fade away, any
more than Newton or Einstein have, but we are questioning
some default assumptions deeply rooted in our culture--see
Miller's casual but inevitable use of "because," above, for
instance. Consider also the questions implicit in a passage
Kernan quotes from McLuhan's _The Gutenberg Galaxy_:
The crucial literary concepts of a central plot
and a single structure are extensions of the
movement of type in precise lines, which generates
"the notion of moving steadily along on single
planes of narrative awareness . . . totally alien
to the nature of language and consciousness."
(Kernan 52)
[31] As Landow himself says, hypertext technology lets us
start testing questions and assumptions. In the case of
story-telling, hypertext does not demand attention to a
single Creative Authority who designs sequences of sensation
and requires that audiences accept them in that order. This
is why there is really no need, in spite of the consistency
and symmetry of Landow's nostalgic argument (that readers
will construe their own causality, and narrative morality
will remain essentially the same), to succumb to the
argument's temptations.
[32] Almost half the book is devoted to ways hypertext
affects realms outside its own texts. The last two chapters
are about pedagogy and politics. Both of them start small
and expand. One begins with students and concludes with
hypertext's effect on canonicity. The other starts out with
"humanist technophobia" and ideology, and ends with a
succinct survey of networks' and hypertext's unpacking of
the mouldy concept of "intellectual property." One sentence
seems to me to be at the heart of both chapters:
"Educational hypertext redefines the role of instructors by
transferring some of their power and authority to students"
(123). Implicit in this kind of transfer, as I have
experienced it, is a modification of the concept "knowledge"
away from a "thing" to be sought and found and guarded and
delivered by coteries--by mysterious "hoods," as in
brotherhoods or priesthoods or doctoral hoods--away from
monolithic thing-ness, that is, and toward a complex system
of interpenetrating contributions. "Facts" don't change
much in such an environment, but some dogmatically
self-evident conclusions are less likely to be called
"facts."
[33] I have watched this happen in a simple, inexpensive
networking environment, and have no trouble accepting
Landow's sweeping statement about the inestimably more
challenging environment of hypermedia. To prevail in that
environment, students have to become engaged with learning.
They will have trouble if they try to get by with habits of
remembering and mimicking. Landow says that hypertext
provides "the perfect means of informing, assisting, and
inspiring the unconventional student" (129), that the
environment "frees learners from constraints of scheduling
without destroying the structure and coherence of a course"
(132), and asks instructors to "rethink examinations and
other forms of evaluation" (134). We also have to make some
adjustments in our beliefs about "knowledge." Instead of
being a commodity that professors have exposed, "knowledge"
is revealed as a dynamic cluster of interacting perceptions
being constructed and transformed by real people.
[34] Pleasing as these abstract ramifications may sound,
they are also disturbing. How many educators really want
"active, independent-minded students who take more
responsibility for their education and are not afraid to
challenge and disagree" (163)? Landow assesses the
prospect as "terrifying" for many, perhaps especially so in
an atmosphere of "widespread humanist technophobia" (164).
[35] Beyond the threat to professors' assumptions about
their power, deeply rooted in the proscenium classroom
(Barker and Kemp), and registrars' schedules and "credit
hours," Landow perceives hypertext as more than a teaching
tool, a learning machine, an "educational program." For him
it is a medium, and its unprecedented massage (sic) is
potentially multicentered and democratizing far beyond the
campus. One already hears rumors about the ways some people
in medium-sized organizations have adjusted their activity
away from obeying and toward collaborating as "horizontal"
networks encroach on "chain-of-command" hierarchies. That
the change is still in the service of "productivity" seems
to me a minor flaw, perhaps temporary, in a near-Odonian
transformation of attitude.
[36] A basic image for Landow, and for this review, has been
*transfer* of power. The author's authority is decreased
and the reader's power is increased by the same "amounts,"
it would seem. Democracy gains to the extent that autocracy
loses. The image implies scarcity, limitation, restriction.
But "power" does not really exist as a fixed quantum, after
all, to be shared only among the privileged and withheld
from, kept secret from, the underclass. In certain
contexts, power resembles information, in that sharing power
does not leave the sharer with less of it. To the extent
that information and power (and authority) overlap,
hypertext's ecology of abundance can be regarded as
spreading all of them around, rather than either reducing or
increasing any of them. To that extent, at least, hypertext
technology resembles network technology: sharing, abundance,
even the dreaded "overload" are its hallmarks, rather than
the sort of de-centering that implies reduction or
diminishment.
[37] Although it takes some rigorous imagining to do so, I
can even extrapolate the hypertext environment in the
direction of broadly anti-propertarian attitudes. The
propertarian, anti-collaborative concepts of artist and
inventor, copyright and patent, publication and secrecy, are
closely linked. But the impetus toward collaboration
already evident in the Matrix or on the Net looks to be
compounded by the experience of hypertext. IF the
overlapping cultural schemas of a) deference to isolated
genius, b) worship of mystery, and c) reverence for
hierarchy continue to be eroded by a technology that
virtually mandates collaboration, our great-grandchildren
will share a radically refabricated culture in which
concepts like intellectual property, trade secrets, and even
searching for The Truth may have been significantly altered.
[38] These declarations are mine, not Landow's. He wisely
stops short of such gee-whiz speculation. His boldness in
discussing pedagogy alongside critical theory, and in
discussing the political implications of an academic
technology, are more significant for me than the specific
directions we may make guesses about.
[39] For it is this convergence of technology, pedagogy,
scientific and literary theorizing, and the feedback
processes of cultural evolution, that Landow's volume
heralds. Indeed, I wish he had brought his talent for
drawing the most crucial particulars out of a complex
framework to bear on the broader academic curriculum (and
political agenda). It seems to me that the sooner we can
integrate hypertext's opportunities for exploration into our
graduate training in all the artistic and critical
disciplines, the greater the likelihood that some system of
positive global cooperation will prevail over the
temptations to self destruct.
[40] There are other matters that I wish Landow had been
able to address. On the technical side, they include the
implications of the broader definition of "text" forthcoming
when "cinema" and "sound" join "plain words" and "pictures"
in the hypermedia "space." On the theoretical side, they
include the intriguing hypothesis that "Time"--as in the
dis-integration of before-and-after relationships--is the
concept that arches over all his reconfigurations.
Pedagogically, they include the implications of the growing
demand for computing resources, including trained people,
that will issue from the humanistic disciplines as the
technology's value to all forms of textual-interpretive
endeavor comes to be recognized. Politically, they include
the ramifications of high cost and slow distribution of the
technology (which brings us full circle, centrifugally,
around the bullseye Landow has anatomized). But in a book
so thoroughly admirable, these few lacunae are no more
worrisome than the missing "the" on page 131.
[41] There are skeptics about hypertext, particularly
scholars concerned about its apparent promotion of
bull-session anarchy and rigorless dissipation. Landow
quotes doubts about "the erosion of the thinking subject"
(Said, _Beginnings_) and "the disintegration of the
centering voice of contemplative thought" (Heim, _Electric
Language_). For Landow himself, however, whatever is lost
at the center appears offset by benefits of collaboration.
In discussing the relationships he experienced during an
Intermedia project, for instance, he lambastes those who,
still bathing themselves "in the afterglow of Romanticism,
uncritically inflate Romantic notions of creativity and
originality to the point of absurdity" (91). Quoting Bolter
about the way "book technology itself created new
conceptions of authorship and publication" (93), Landow
celebrates the fact that "hypermedia linking automatically
produces collaboration" (95).
[42] There is also suspicion that anything to do with
computers is essentially materialistic and centralized, and
an associated suspicion that any "program" must be a
"product" whose acceptance will implicate us in the
machinations of the producers. One reviewer, objecting to
Jay Bolter's attitude toward computing technology (in
_Writing Space_), links this threat (of a "decentering,
associative technology being developed by and for the
greater consolidation of post-industrial, multi-national,
capitalistic institutions") with "a neo-conservative
position" and "Republican ideology" (Tuman, "Review,"
262-63). The paradox of "consolidated decentering" might be
resolvable, but it will be hard for a while yet to fight the
presumption that *network* technology and *hypertext*
technology have the same effects on their users. I can
testify that the impacts are very different, however, and I
will insist that confusing the concept *hypertext* with
whoever delivers and installs a particular version is like
confusing the generic technology of the book with the
sellers of paper and printing presses; hypertext is a
generic technology, not a product. And Usenet (to shift to
The Matrix of networks) is like an anarchists' convention
compared with commercial bulletin boards' shopping malls.
[43] A related objection, also directed at Bolter and
_Writing Space_, has been to his "radical environmentalism,"
which allows the "human mind to be shaped by whatever
writing space it happens to be occupying" (Kaufer and
Neuwirth, "Review," 260). But while one must certainly
beware of absolute technological determinism, it seems clear
enough that the human mind is used differently, say, in
paper-based cultures than in memory-dependent societies. If
that translates into environmental "shaping," then
hypertext, in its disruption of such self-evident categories
as "reader" and "writer," would seem already to have begun
to reshape us.
[44] Hypertext is as radical a social technology as there
has been since compound interest, and its subsequences won't
crystallize in a rationally predictable way. Who could have
prophesied, for instance, that the internal-combustion
engine and the quartz-crystal radio would play out as
suburban decentralization and public television
broadcasting? I am willing to predict that the nature of
record-keeping is going to change now that we can tape
events in "real-time" as well as write down summaries from
memory. Since we live in a record-grounded culture, that
is, changes in recording technology will have effects as
profound as they are gradual--over the next century or two.
Hypertext, a recording medium, will play some part in those
tectonic changes, but it is far too early to predict its
exact role or the precise changes. Isaac Asimov once made
the point that most people can carry out a plausible
straight-line extrapolation of (some) effects of change in a
single variable. He grinned as he added that plotting the
feedback effects where those extrapolations affect other
variables is, shall we say, more difficult. Few "variables"
affect the understructure of culture more subtly or
seismically than its recording technology, and hypertext is
an unprecedented, appealing, available recording technology.
Its effects on what we call "writing" may turn out to be as
momentous as those of photography on "drawing."
[45] I doubt that any member of the four hostile audiences I
enumerated at the outset will now rush off to buy Landow's
_Hypertext_. But I hope that others who are more prepared
to credit an emerging technology with the potential to
radically reshape our institutional lives--right down to
such assumed conceptual bedrock as text, author, story,
knowledge, and reader--will give this admirable book the
chance to convince them.
------------------------------------------------------------
WORKS CITED
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and the History of Writing_. Hillsdale, New Jersey:
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Delany, Paul, and George P. Landow, eds. _Hypermedia and
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