This collection (and the reviews, for that matter) spends much time contemplating form, function and the role of constraints, whether institutional, disciplinary, or legislative. Nick Carbone's exploration of potential outcomes for creating web journals for student publishing focuses on more immediate (for the students) issues of validation of student writing and membership in academic communities. Perhaps what has the greatest staying power in Carbone's chapter is the notion of how/why writing matters. As Carbone says, "[w]riting this chapter holds import for me. I know it is intended for a collection of dispatches. I know the other contributors are respected in the field of computers and writing. I know the book will be read and reviewed...The situation is real" (emphasis mine).
      The situation is real...these words echo in my head as I examine other chapters, or "dispatches," as they are frequently termed. On a continuum, how real are each of these situtations to the authors? How real to the readers? I find myself redefining real in the sense of deliverables--what do various texts allow me to take away? Perhaps a meditation on yet another iteration of form, whether it be conventional, academic prose, or something else--the dialogic contribution of Myka Vielstimmig, the MOO transcripts, or any of the other variations of the "ambiscriptual." Perhaps, in the case of Judi Kirkpatrick's piece, a sense of where to begin if one seems overwhelmed by the amount of information and technology to be assimilated. Perhaps a sense of forboding, of the unknown, when I read Deb Scheuller's reflection:

Do you think people have ethical considerations or concerns regarding the web and digital technologies other than whether or not "books" survive or perhaps whether we should hijack gifs, pirate software, or plagiarize ideas, or misrepresent commercial products? Or do we live in an age and a place (late 20th centure capitalist middle America) where ethics and culture, at least in their traditional definitions, no longer exist?

Today I revisit those words for the first time since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and on the Pentagon. I hear the words from my co-reviewer, Geoff Sirc:

Maybe I’m too blinded by present-tense concerns.... 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.

I also hear Wlad Godzich, in his forward to de Certeau's Heterologies: Discourse on the Other:

...discourses constitute forms of actual social interaction and practice. As such, they are not irrational, but they are subject to the pulls and pressures of the situations in which they are used as well as to the weights of their own traditions. They must always handle the complex interplay of that which is of the order of representation and the nonrepresentable part which is just as much constitutuve of them, their own other...they are logics, that is they have a coherence sui generis, one that needs to be rigorously and thoroughly described in each instance.

And I hear myself, censoring, editing before the hands even touch the keyboard:

what are you doing...you're supposed to be reviewing here...but I am...not a hypertext... is one needed? perhaps not...after all...multivocality is achieved both within and across the existing nodes...and needs appear when warranted, not when required or expected...

But what of the text under consideration? Unlike in our initial MOO session, I find myself spinning outward, moving away from the text itself toward the current context of uncertainty, all the while feeling this pull to return to the text, to consideration of the worlds and words it puts forth. I can say that whether the chapters are of traditions old or of nascent forms (though MOOs are hardly nascent anymore), one can enjoy and find provocative the engagement with form/process/art/techne. In the short term, that is enough.
      But what about for the longer term, since, after all, this is a book--an artifact of supposedly longer half-life than many of the forms that constitute "the other"? Throughout the text, most apparently in its experimental chapters, New Worlds, New Words displays the tension generated from its locus as a privileged "technological procedure" (de Certeau 188) and its desire to display alternate developments that are still exploring their potential as discursive configurations. Whether it inspires further developments in this direction or serves as a snapshot of the last years of the 20th century will not be known for some years to come.

-slang