Hypertext, and the technology that supports it, has allowed me to voice the concerns that I have always felt, if not articulated, in print text. And yet throughout the CCCC session in Arizona, I stood pushing my elbows against a wall, determined not to intrude on the audience's reading of the text. I wanted to guide the readers, to show them how to read the text, to encourage them to move along. . . . I kept feeling that the audience was missing the point. In short, I yearned for the permanent, authorial, relentlessly uni-dimensional guidance of a print text.

Later, I realized that rather than having little or no guidance, the audience had been misguided. Throughout the reading, social concerns had overridden intellectual concerns. The nature of the session, five presenters, each hoping to discuss his or her section, had prompted the audience to sample a little of each subdivision rather than pursue meaning via the interior textual links. I suggested to Mike that perhaps we needed a different sort of navigation structure, one that would emphasize larger concerns rather than the divisions between texts. The current piece represents our efforts to move in that direction.