I hope writers like Vielstimmig or those who advocate MOO-text don’t stubbornly maintain that the new essay has to be in any way multi-voiced. I’m saddened that so many e-literacy theorists take that notion as a given. Literalized polyvocality is by now a techno-rhetorical cliché. There are many other ways, waiting to be discovered, of making the new essay “increasingly performative, not in the sense of affectation or artifice, but in the sense of bringing to life” (130). What Pollock, for example, was able to effect visually can be achieved literally – that “textured literacy” (137), as Spooner and Yancey call it. It’s not going to come, I don’t think, by concentrating on how we say things; those “new ways of working; new forms of representation; new identity” (139) Spooner and Yancey theorize will come the same way they came with Jackson: by focusing on what we want to say, on content. Jackson didn’t fetishize media, he’d use anything: "Sometimes I use a brush, but often prefer using a stick. Sometimes I pour the paint straight out of the can. I like to use a dripping, fluid paint. I also use sand, broken glass, pebbles, string, nails or other foreign matter. The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement."
     So it’s sad, for example, to see Judy Kirkpatrick engage in techno-snobbery, tsk-tsking those teachers “unwilling to let go of the technologies with which they have practiced, the telephone, the typewriters, paper, the copy machine, blackboards, chalk, and transparencies, all products of the mid-20th century” (350).
      More remarkable is to watch scholars who value the cool far-outness of new technolgies move so quickly from delight in the fluid ideas capturable in new literacy technolgies to a by-god re-affirmation of prescriptive formalism: “conventional wisdom in hypertext design and implementation suggests that each node in a webtext should be capable of standing alone, and should be able to function as the first node a reader/traveler encounters” (98), or “There is, still, a correctness to communicating in professional environments, and a societal demand that such writing be evaluated, editorially, before dissemination and publication” (105). Such comments read like the in-house style-sheet for tech-com writers, not the tenets of a pedagogy of wonder and exploration, commensurate with powerful composing technologies. Hawisher & Selfe get at this phenomenon when they note that “the work in the field of computers and composition . . . has been fundamentally traditional . . . new ways to teach realtively familiar kinds of written assignments” (189).
     Web-text, one would think, should focus not on the object/form but rather the participatory space between producer and consumer. People come together in the immediacy of consumption: there is the chance to have a moment you can leave the screen and take with you. The scene of electronic writing, literalizing the notion of space, allows a focus not so much on the text but on the ‘being-there’; so it’s surprising when techno-rhetoricians retreat into formalism. Modernism, with its sacred notion of limits, its eternal return to the object itself, is obviously hard to shake, even in the face of fluid texts. I’m heartened, then, when Michael Day bums out in a similar vein: “I see a generation of students dutifully unsquiggling their prose – and in so doing voiding it of artistry and originality” (264).
      Hugh Burns unwittingly names the problem, maintaining “Text was, is, and still will be techne” (3). Far more importantly, I think, it’s content, statement. To fetishize technique leads to virtuosity, a specious value. The difference is that between Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, between Celine Dion and Bob Dylan: one delights in sheer surface beauty; the other uses the grain of the voice to establish a wholly new world, one governed by an ethos so pronounced you could articulate its truths in detail. One works further into the text itself, closing in on its perfection; the other results from an aesthetics of exscription, an opening-out into the world.

-geoff