Michelle Kendrick wrote:

Every new technology justifies itself with a dual gesture... at once forward (to thefuture, to its "advanced" capacities, etc) and backwards (to the prior technologies it supplements, replaces, and "improves."). So hypertext gestures back at a subject that it replaces and forward at a "new" improved subject.

I'm thinking of film text I reviewed long ago that argued, essentially, that every art prior to film was nothing but a move toward film. Scanning the stage or the crowd with opera glasses is filmic. A comic strip's frames are filmic. Walking around a diorama? You guessed it, filmic. Thus, film itself gets positioned as the inevitable result of technological evolution, a term we conflate with progress, with a *natural* (hmm) push toward perfection. In _The Presence of the Word_, Ong makes the same observation about back formation that you do, noting that we see a horse "never as a horse but always as a four-legged automobile without wheels." No surprise that we also do the reverse (at least while we are occupying the contact zone between present and emerging technologies), seeing the automobile never as merely an automobile, but always as a horseless carriage, with such and so horsepower--the book always as a nonclikable hypertext, chock full of link-ridden nodes positively pulsing with potential blueness. Just as the car changes our conception of what travel can be, so does hypertext alter our conception of all text, and of all of the constituencies that bring a text into being.

I think it can tell us a lot about 1) technologies relationship to our cultural constructions of the subject 2) how our pedagogies/theories are situated and influenced by the claims made for and about new technologies/subjects 3) the political (in the broadest sense) consequences of these complex interweavings.

I'd add to point two that distinguishing claims from observations, and observations from desires, complicates matters.

I'm still thinking about your "cyberspace as cybermall" question. Occurs to me that I've seen two main metaphors for cyberspace so far: the panopticon and the mall. Makes me wanna say, "Hey, let's throw schools in there, too, thus paying homage to *all* our greatest human institutions." <wry grin>

hmmmm. I have to believe there are no better panopticons than the malls. Why else all those mirrors?? Self policing of your body image, your old clothes, and your "lack". (Am I projecting here too obviously :-)

I guess if you projected all *that* obviously you wouldn't sense a lack. ;-) But, yes. Malls for gazing upon ourselves and the objects of our desire, and malls for blurring whatever shimmering line might separate the two. Add Lacan and Lewis Carroll to the mix, then. On the other hand, a mall could be considered a sort of a prison in which viewing oneself (stepping into the I) can't be permitted. The reflections it depends on fragment the self beyond integration. In a mall, only the self is immaterial.

I don't object to consumer being used when what is happening is economic consumption. So we may as well be consumers at amazon.com or ebay... but to cast the reader as consumer seems to have some interesting implications. If the author, in western culture, has been the fundamental subject -- it seems it was based on a model of production. You were/are unique insofar as you produce something original and unique. Your "self"ness is encoded and made permanent in the writerly act. Now we move to a model of consumption -- You are what you eat :-)

Didn't our ancient philosophers (somebody bail me out please, by providing the name I can't remember) tell us so? But of course we are, in part, what we eat. What else could fuel or nurture writing so well? Sometimes, my poetry writing students fuss at me for expecting that they should actually *read* poetry as well as writing it. They worry about being derivative. But why wouldn't we draw from one another? How could it be otherwise? Long ago, reviewing early composition texts, I came across this phrase, coined by one frustrated by naive belief in the mythically generative power of heuristics: "no amount of pumping will draw water from a well run dry." The interdependencies of production and consumption seem as inescapable to me as the dual forces of the past and future, writer and reader. Origins and endings can never be captured. The ever unfolding present-s can never be stilled into fixed presences. All is imminence/immanence/emergence. Whatever sleight of hand (magic, trickery) lends hypertext its power to make emergence at least appear concrete fascinates me.

your "self"ness is made up of your selections among items in a finite system. Now I understand that readers of hypertext also "construct" something through the connections they make and that readers are active in that sense. I'm talking about what is being priveleged as a cultural force in making the subject. I don't necessarily see the change as negative, but I do see it as a change that has important ramifications for teaching and learning and writing.

I've been thinking, lately, of hypertextual relationships expressed (this from the floracide queen) in terms of ecosytems. Some, like the Eastgate creations, are closed. Like a terrarium or a manicured garden, they either can't accept volunteers, or summarily remove them. Every volunteer an alien or a weed. Others, such as this list, are open. In the latter case, the possibilities, while perhaps not infinite, don't seem quite as circumscribed as you seem to suggest. Don't know where that metaphor will go yet. If it's anything like my actual plants, I give it a week. Maybe metaphorical plants make heartier companions, though. Like heather, they probably at least manage to be decorative when they die.

Couldn't be surly today because on Sunday night I not only graded a whole set of papers, but actually enjoyed them, which made me feel simultaneously teacherly, in the best sense of the poor abused word, and virtuous. Woke up early to make coffee, too. Disgusting, ain't it? Don't worry, though, by Thursday I'll undoubtedly be a snarly wreck.

Kathy at C.O.D.