I was just going to say, "Right," and leave it at that, but that seemed a little too cute. I think I'm actually in agreement with Collin on most of this--what's surfaced here (that is rarely surfaced elsewhere) is the degree to which claims about categories have to be actively and concretely justified rather than just taken as given; furthermore, the degree to which categories are active and contingent claims about how things should be.

All of my sweeping, blanket statements aside (they should be taken in all cases as smirking), there's an obvious experienced difference between reading afternoon and reading amazon.com--but what I'm interested in is *why* and *how* that felt difference is constructed. So what I see Collin (and others) doing here is connecting up an active suspicion of market economies.

But to return to this: what *is* the difference between reading afternoon and reading amazon.com? Is it that afternoon isn't considered to be a postmodern capitalist experience? Is it that we can imagine Michael Joyce's somber brow knitted over the task of adding one more link to the "I just want to say" node? [footnote 1]

For that matter, why wouldn't we want to do a critical reading of amazon.com, a deconstructive reading that helped students contest the "Our picks" list on the site (which, btw, is constructed by direct sponsorship rather than some cozy reading circle in tweed hashing out the 10 best books of the month)? Can't we actually make a bigger difference in student's lives--a more positive change--by helping them read a postmodern economy in resistant and transformative ways?

- Johndan

[footnote 1: Look, a proto-hypertext. I'm trying to avoid sounding satirical here, since I also sense these distinctions when I read hypertext that seems "literary" versus that that seems "functional". And Michael Joyce taught me everything I know about hypertext, and I continue to like his work quite a bit; see <http://tempest.english.purdue.edu/twilight.confessions/>.]

At 3:50 PM -0500 4/30/99, Collin Brooke wrote:

Ok. Here goes. Geoff writes:

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 want to make more out of them than that?

I guess my first response is that I'm not that interested in pitting one against the other, of suggesting that YOU MUST CHOOSE, or anything so dramatic or binary as that. I'm not that interested in Amazon, period, any more than I'm interested in "reading" the new MacArthur Center, which promises to "revitalize" poor, old downtown Norfolk. Could be done--I could even probably do it, I suppose--and it could be done in interesting ways. And I suppose I'm still enough of a dud to resist the notion that shopping is hypertextual--when I "read" Amazon, I'm using a catalog algorithmically derived from my shopping patterns, the kind of point-of-sale marketing that Mitchell celebrates in City of Bits. I'm a pretty docile cog in the kapitalist machine, all things considered, but not to the point where I wouldn't still turn away from "you are what you buy"--I don't think that's what Steve's saying, but it doesn't strike me as too far of a stretch.

What's the point? You answered that better than I could further down in your message...

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.

I suppose it probably sounds like I'm pushing for that specialization, but I really don't want that, either. When I use ht in my classes, I try to push against my students who see the web exclusively in terms of advertising or customer service--I genuinely think that it can change the way they think because it has for me. It becomes harder and harder for me to write without the experiences that Anne spoke of--I don't know whether that makes me hip neo-tribalist wannabe, an esoteric fetishist, or just some putz that will end up in a padded room with my cupped hand clicking an invisible mouse. Whichever it ends up being, I do want to understand it better, and to be able to expose my students to it, and my own belief is that to do so, I need more than "hypertext = linking" or "hypertext is a way of reading any text." That's all I'm really getting at.

They may be good enough for everyone else, and that's cool. I guess I just don't see much in those kinds of definitions beyond what Barthes was saying about plain, old reading 30 years ago without the benefit of a Pentium III.

Finally, at the risk of burning in my own little shmackademic hell, I would confess that my goals for hypertext are a little more modest than changing the world--were they not, I'd agree with Johndan:

My point with that, I guess, was that I didn't see hypertext in general as all that revolutionary; mostly, I see it as conserving (and increasing) existing lines of power.

My point here is not that I disagree with him, but that I would add that our inability to differentiate between amazon and afternoon fuels that conservation of power. As my students might attest, I'm no high priest at the afternoon altar, but neither am I quite ready to give up the possibility that there's something worthwhile in articulating the differences between them. I do believe hypertext is something different, and even valuable, but I see that far more when I read afternoon than I do when I give amazon money. I'm sure that leaves me just as vulnerable to "so what?" as when I started, but that's all I got.

collin

- Johndan Johnson-Eilola
Director of Professional Writing
Department of English
Purdue University
<mailto:johndan@purdue.edu>
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1356
<http://tempest.english.purdue.edu>

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