Collin-

I'm not really sure what you're saying in your last message. Why pit amazon against afternoon? What's the point? Both are texts, which people will read and use as they choose. Why do you want to make more out of them than that?

I find the discussion of amazon interesting. Just like this hypertext discussion. I was eager to participate in this, to hear what you all had to say, cause this medium (even though the clock is ticking as fast as the Web fills up with ads) still seems able to do what I want educational materials to do: transform the human mind and create a new culture. If hypertext/WWW/whatever isn't going to do that, then there's no use discussing it. It just becomes a different way to do page layout or something. Or an on-line shopping tool.

So back to amazon. What I really wonder with all this talk about amazon, here and on acw-l, is . . . what's everyone reading? These people that are ordering all these books . . . just what are they ordering? How are they using them? Is it helping? Or is it just more stuff?

If the ability to shop for books and CDs from our office or whatever isn't going to help radically bring about another culture --where, well, whatever . . . where non-black people don't hate black people, where kids don't implode and shoot classmates, whatever tragic mess you want to bring up-then we're wasting time better spent elsewhere.

That's why I'm interested in hypertext as heuristic not necessarily specialized genre or medium or form. If it doesn't help me change the world, if it can't bleed into my life as a whole, I'm not sure I see the point, beyond fetishism. It's Kathy's point about frames, which I also hate: only someone who didn't get the possibilities of this medium would come up with frames. Steve says, well, with this hypertext-in-genreral definition, reading the phone book could be hypertext. That's the whole point, isn't it? Or am I missing something? How would it transform our lives, change our consciousness, if we thought of the phone book as clickable? The TV repair guy node might have a link to . . . what? What's underscoring the plumber? No one's saying all is hypertext You can read a phone book dully or you can read it a way that can cause a transformation in your thinking. You can read a hypertext in a really dull way, too (in fact, it's hard not to read most of them dully).

And this notion about one thing blocking community-building I don't buy at all. Are we all active in our neighborhood organizations? Do we chat with our neighbors a lot? Help them? There are no blocks to community-building except those we put up ourselves. Is reading afternoon guaranteed to turn someone into some sort of hip neo-tribalist? Maybe it's the book of poems they order on amazon that will do that.

And pardon me, but what decline in literature? Who the hell is Gerry Graff? Have you really noticed a decline? Hit me up, cause I could suggest some titles.

Geoff