***Susan -- You end by writing 'I think having them create their own hypertexts can go a long way toward warding off "transparency."'

***Nick -- You end by writing "Writing as reading, not simply clicking in passivity, and showing folk how to write in these places, and helping them get the tools to do that, wherever they are and whomever they are, in ways that are generous and compelling and not condescending and coercive, that's where the challenge, and I think the more interesting work is to be found. "

There's a shift in focus here, perhaps?, from those 10-years-ago-now-but-continuing initial discussions of hypertext that spoke of hypertexts empowering readers because readers have to, well, sort of, become authors as they read hypertexts, to these words that, to me, argue that it is in the process of writing these hypertext/web things that writers gain...

What writers gain/take on/ (please insert appropriate words here) seem to be multiple:

1. Joyce's notion of constructive hypertexts I'll mention here again, in terms of how he does seem to describe constructive texts as those you make yourself: he describes his students (pause here while I go find the damn book) in their writing able to "perceive and express ... the existence of information below the surface of a writing and to use that awareness of structure in commonplace fashion to empower themselves."

2. Nick's latest comments nudge Joyce into a more visibly social position, as Nick speaks of how the web (here is how I am taking your words, Nick) allows many -- and not just those who can get their words published by some 'official' publisher -- the "opportunity and means for writing themselves into the larger culture more fully". I am assuming here, Nick, that you are relying on the wide visibility of the web (as you mention it early on in your message) as the quality that makes those other, usually invisible, words visible -- a flashlight with a wider angle lens?

3. Susan's comment implies that the process of writing by making use of the wider range of linking/visual/pieces of hypertexts/writing on computers helps writers become aware of the materiality/positionality of this means of writing, keeps the results of this kind of writing from seeming natural.

4. 
   

   
   

5. 
   

Where to go with these mixed perspectives on writing? In my Sunday morning post-donut thickness I can only offer some crude questions: Is it simply that learning to write less-for-books and more-for-screens automatically --because of the structures of screen-based texts -- makes these changes? That making our selves visible on the web automatically gives us more substantiality? How much do how/where (as Nick points out) we teach and learn these ways of writing have to do with the fine outcomes described above?

Argh. Help?

Thanks, Anne

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Anne Frances Wysocki
Humanities Department
Michigan Technological University
Houghton, MI 49931

http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~awysocki