The third section, "Paradigm: Understandings of Self and Others," brings
us to considerations of the communal and the individual, as each moves
throughout cyberspace.
- Susan Barnes and Carolyn Guyer, separately, on "virtual community," both specific and general, on the self and other, the personal and the political, and
- Cynthia Haynes, Jan Rune Holmevik, Beth Kolko, and Victor J. Vitanza on the various movements of MOO communities.
Formally, what’s most engaging about these pieces is their move to deconstruct the written text of the book, in that the authors present their work in unusual, challenging formats--offering the reader, in as much as possible in book form, examples of MOO conversations and graphically inventive "texts." In this way, these pieces pick up on important questions raised in the introduction, such as, "Will electronic text allow us to structure an environment where writing and graphic representation can be reintegrated?" (5). Indeed, the assumption here seems to be that "Presentational qualities take precedence over the discursive" (5-6). But visuals have their own rhetorics--ones that inform, impact, shape, and move in conjunction with rhetorics of more traditional, print literacies. Tracing their interconnections and interweavings seems to me, at least, to be one of the primary tasks in understanding the emerging cyberculture.
And the metaphor of movement remains evident in these essays; you never once think you’re not reading a book, but you will be moved to think about the ways in which technological innovations can expand our conceptions of literacy--and, in the process, move our thinking of ourselves in new directions, across multiple disciplines.