My interest in networked writing environments, although closely associated with composition and rhetoric, is actually part and parcel of my special interest in video production. That is, before I got my hands on a networked computer, I began trying my hand at "screening" (rather than writing) video essays. Video essays interested me in the mode of reasoning by pattern rather than logic and thus delivered me unto the networked computer with a taste for composition in the photographic rather than the chirographic sense. My interest in *production* brings me to zin/ography.

On a more personal level, I moved from academic writing to video production and now hypermedia in an attempt to outrun the pain and boredom of traditional academic writing -- a jaunt that leads me to the issue at hand: being in pictures. Why do I find academic writing painful and boring? Because, as a result of its love affair with critical distance, academic writing solicits a rational, unified subject from a postmodern subjectivity. Academic writing asks student writers to abstract from themselves and masquerade, like wolves in sheeps' clothing, as humanist subjects.

Zin/ography is a poetics, or an interface, for staging the postmodern rather than the humanist subject. Translated for hypermedia, this interface reasons by pattern rather than logic. Functioning as a zin/ographic example, "Being in Pictures" exploits the pedagogical practicality of networked interfaces that stage the socially constructed subject.