Robert Irwin, one of the early poets of electronic environments, discovered a truth while working on his compositions in light: when you minimize the image, you maximize presence. That’s what good web-writing always feels like to me, an opening-out, a sense of myself in a world. The authors of many of the articles in this collection choose instead to maximize image, offering dense spaces cluttered with repeated motifs from a surprisingly consistent image-stock (Bush, Bolter, Landow, Rushkoff, Murray, Stone, Birkerts, Turkle, Oldenburg). (Granted they're working in print, but, nevertheless, it's print theorizing electronic media.) Doherty unwittingly captures the insular uniformity of this type of prose texture when he announces "every paragraph or claim in any of these chapters could be apprpriately placed as (at least) a footnote somewhere in any of the other chapters" (96).
      A passage cited from Turkle – “learning to see ourselves as plugged-in technobodies . . . redescribing our politics and economic life in a language that is resonant with a particular form of machine intelligence” (25) – could stand for all the postmodern musing in here, trying to will reality into fitting the discourse, assertiing a cool new present inspired by techno-poetic possibilities. “What will we be concerned with in the future?” John Barber keeps asking (388). Maybe I’m too blinded by present-tense concerns, but I assume we’ll be worrying then about the same things we worry about now: ecocide, hatred, racism, violence, poverty, cruelty, the fate of children. Abandoning focus on such basic concerns to delight instead in a mythic cosmology of techno-bodies and data-trash, self-destructing books and compulsory technology – this theory that re-imagines life as some hip new animé – seems to come from a sweet, silly time now ages past.
      Slouka’s notion of “[no] facts, just ideologies of the moment” (which Victor cites [84]), sounds like it comes off the lips of some strenuous trendy in a Waugh novel. I recall Bob Connors, standing up in a very crowded 4Cs ballroom, during the Q&A after one of the first sessions attempting to articulate a postmodern composition. Bob stepped to the mic for his question and very slowly, kindly, asked, “Exactly what’s wrong with foundationalism?” After a sort of stunned silence, the presenters stammered a repeat of their basic litany. Bob’s question stubbornly nags at the inflationary, rhapsodic discourse of composition. ‘Ideologies of the moment’? And the moments when, say, compassion is inapplicable are . . . ?

-geoff