I think I'm more in agreement with Susan and Johndan than with Nick on this: I do not think text *has* to be on a computer before we call it hypertext -- there are lovely, wonderful, and perplexing things we can do on paper that (as Susan and others -- Aarseth, for example -- point out) ask the same (or at least very similar) kinds of attentions as anything put out through Eastgate. And, as Johndan points out, there are things on screen that are more restrictive in the readings they ask than anything on paper.

The question this raises for me, then, comes out of Susan's observations: given all the above, why does it seem that something tremendous has happened for/to/with writing because of computer screens? (Or something frightening, if your name is Sven.) What is it about the current ("current" here = last 25 or so years, with more intensity in the last 10) situation that makes our ways of reading more visible? It can't be just that we are seeing stuff on screen -- we see stuff on paper all the time...

Is it a shift in the means of production (all of a sudden we have the equivalent of our own printing presses)? The convergence of means of production and theory (deconstruction affecting Nelson's ways of thinking, from a French distance)? What desires led to the development of the computer as we know it, which makes possible (has developed alongside of) an awareness that there is more to do with text than black lines on white paper?

Anne, thinking she ate a cereal with a little too much sugar in it this morning

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Anne Frances Wysocki
Humanities Department
Michigan Technological University
http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~awysocki