James Berlin describes the acquisition and negotiation of ordinary discourse as a process in which texts are produced through a variety of means, then they are consumed by an audience of cultural participants. The participants engage in an interpretive negotiation with the texts, which become "part of the lived cultures or social relations of the interpreters" (113). Like Berlin, I see students engaged in a process of consumption, interpretation and reproduction with cultural artifacts, but in a computerized composition classroom, these transactions morph into yet another set of transformative experiences. The negotiative process is not only sped up, but it is also more evident, particularly with the introduction of cultural artifacts from networked communication.

Although consumption is immediate, interpretation is at once vapid and difficult:

• vapid-- Webbed texts are imagistic and two-dimensional. They are hyped-up decontextualized virtualities, often favoring style over substance, or at least blurring the line between the two.
• difficult-- Webbed texts complicate the interpretive process because they often combine editorial information and advertising. Interpreting these cultural experiences entails another level of negotiation and evaluation.

In a sense, the consumption of webbed cultural discourse discourages the production of critical texts by decontextualizing and slowing down the interpretive process.

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