Nice job, James.;)

Thanks, Ted! (;

As I've been reading through the excellent posts that have been coming in, I've been interested in the way folks connect (or disconnect) by choice the relationship between print and electronic hypertextual writings/readings. Nick's explanation of delimiting on/offline has me thinking about the choices I make in my own work now.

To add a bit . . . . One of the things that's always interested me about hypertext is just what it does to our understandings of large scale processes like reading and writing. In the late 80s and early 90s, we saw certainly a number of studies explaining to us some of the differences between reading online and reading offline (Haas, Selfe, etc), and it seems like one of the things we're coming back to now is this: ok, we know print and electronic environments are going to coexist for a while now, so what do they mean together for us? Even in just our short conversation, we can look at the number of times and the sorts of ways 'reader' and 'writer' have been used--in Ted's post, for example, moments ago, he described afternoon and Shakespeare using those terms. I think I like the convergence, but I'm still working through the ways it informs what we do.

So, as we're sorting through examples, attempting to come to some sort of definition, I'm wondering now what my frequent visits to amazon.com mean for the way I think about and read books I might grab offa the library shelves here. Or, what does my having read hypertext fiction (or hypertext fact, as Greg points out ) mean for my reading print materials? I think about Anne Wysocki's work too, especially her excellent webtext in _Kairos_ 3.2, and I wonder what the visual aspects of hypertext do for my 'reading' and 'writing,' as well as my interpreting of print and digital images.

Finally, I dunno, as cop-out-ish as that sounds. When I get impatient reading a book, I want immediately to jump into the GeneratioNext, I-don't-have-an-attention-span view, as if to justify the impatience, but finally, that isn't a satisfying reason or explanation. I run into the same feeling when I'm trying, say, to read something in _Kairos_ and simultaneously watch the clock---hypertext reading/writing and short time availability (for lack of a better way of saying that) don't seem happy partners.

Anyway, some more ideas . . .

James