you'll have to forgive me if I'm a little impatient in my response to Landow this week. I found myself impatient with this text. How can Landow celebrate the value and virtue of hypertext in 60-70 page chapters? How can he talk about empowering readers and leave so little room for us to make choices? I often found myself skimming entire sections (or skipping them altogether) looking for the nugget of wisdom that was embedded in paragraph after paragraph of needless prose. I realize that academics are in love with their own words, no offense to our esteemed leader, but he is talking here about making the text more usable to a reader, letting the reader find and make connections for herself, and yet for pages on end I was asked to wade through what amounted to tangents.

To turn this to something a bit more useful, I suppose it could (and should) be argued that one man's tangent is another's gold mine. But as I found myself trying to imagine this "liberating" docuverse I kept thinking of how difficult it is already , given the mass of information that we deal with, to find the goods. Even as we develop our skills as "co-authors" of texts we will need even better surgical skills--cutting away the uneccessary (to whom?) or unwanted.

We count now, I suppose, on editors to do this for us. For peers to read through journal submissions and book manuscripts to separate the wheat from the chaff. Who will do that in the docuverse. When, as Landow celebrates, the novice and the expert text sit side by side with no indication, on the surface, of which is which, what will be the measure of value? usefulness? I'm the last one to argue that what comes through our current system of checks and balances is foolproof. Reading CCC sometimes makes me wonder what gets turned down. But it is a system, a structure that has built into it a level, however tenuous, of respectability and predictability. And the web, at least, has begun to apply some of those same procedures--online refereed journals, librarian recommended websites, familiar publications (The New York Times). But that puts us back in the position of waiting and paying for materials--not to mention relying on some "body" to decide what is and is not of value...I'm getting circular and tired....

/rant

Reconfiguring the Writer:

Disorientation:

A significant consideration for hypertext authors and readers is disorientation. Landow posits the notion of disorientation as one of expertise within the medium. "...[T]he neophyte or inexperienced reader finds unpleasantly confusing materials that more expert readers find a source of pleasure" (117). In other words, our feelings of discomfort are keyed to our understanding of the rhetoric and style of the genre (or in this case the medium). He goes on to talk about the difference between getting lost in a system (the software) versus getting lost in the content of a system (the text). The expectations, experience and needs of the reader will play a role in how he/she interacts and engages. This is one of those places where we see the "naturalized" nature of book technology--a book offers us little in the way of surprise and the technology of the book is familiar, even natural to us.

Notice here, and throughout these chapters, Landow uses the term reconfigure but his aim seems, in large part, to be to show that nothing much has really changed. Readers and writers are confronted with changes and challenges that are related to familiar experiences in "traditional" textual environments--where is the reconfiguartion? Are these changes or merely minor adjustments to time-worn practices?

Rhetoric and Stylistics:

Driving this section for Landow are two questions: "First, what are the defining characteristics or qualities of hypertext as a reading and writing medium? Second, to what extent do they depend upon specific hardware and software" (123). The first question is one I'm not sure Landow ever explicity answers (and one that I suspect George is anxious for us to attempt to answer--yes?). I've been trying to read for what hypertext is,does, or is hoped to be. At various points throughout the text it appears as a genre, a revolution, an evolution, a social movement, the embodiment of French theories, a new form of literacy, a piece of software, a feminist writing tool, an aggresive form of reading...to name but a few. Some of these are specific characterisitics of hypertext, some are results of interactions with hypertext. I'm not all that interested in pinning Landow down (he is sufficiently elusive that I think we would be chasing our tail), but I am curious about how we now, an eternity down the road in technological years, understand the term. Any takers?

Problems for authors: Orientation, Navigation, Departure, Arrival (124). To what degree can we exploit the software and/or hardware to answer these questions (as we do with books)? Landows side roads down software packages here does little for me at this point, but the overarching questions remain. How do we position readers in our texts, how much control over the experience do we want (where they can and do go), and is the experience of a hypertext ever complete (is the experience of a book ever complete)?

Hypertext as Collage:

"...all hypertext webs, no matter how simple, how limited, inevitably take the form of textual collage, for they inevitably work by juxtaposing different texts, often appropriating them as well" (171). This, to me, is another example of the range of potential of text...all texts are, if you understand language as inherently and undeniably social, a collage of ideas, a juxtapositon of different texts (as are people). Does hypertext simply make this more acceptable, more visible, more prominent? I'm trying to find something new and distinctive here...maybe that is a mistake.

Jackson, Quibbling,Storyworlds:

I'm going to jump to these section of this chapter because, quite frankly, I found it the most interesting and the most puzzling. Landow's reading of Jackson was not nearly as interesting as some of the people he quoted. I was particularly struck by the notion of the link as scar: "...the essence of hypertext is linking, the private ways that the author chooses to arrange her piece, and the reader uses to meander through it. Just as the monster finds pleasure and identity in her scars, good hypertext [definition please] works are defined and distinguished by their unique linking structure" (202). This brings me back to the notion of intrusive linking from our last discussion. The outrage, both in our discussion and public discussions, of someone else putting links (commercial or otherwise) into OUR texts (notice the sense of ownership and investment) seemed just wrong. The pristine beauty of a constructed text, the RIGHT of authors to decide, seemed under attack.

I talked in an earlier section about the "quality" of lexica that are linked together--what about the quality of the links themselves? When a link is put into a personal text, when I go onto our collaborative site and I choose a word in someone else's text I'm cutting into the body of work--I'm joining texts together in ways that may frustrate, infuriate, undermine, etc. either the text, the author, or both.

Obviously, because they are laregly self-contained on cd or floppy, these authors are much more in control...they are the ones creating the links. But the imagined ideal seems to be for anyone to have authorship writes over any text...what are the implications? Will we have a say in who can put what where? Do I live with someone linking a porn site to my paper on Foucault's History of Sexuality (actually I think Foucault would find that funny)?

My other sort of point of departure in this chapter was the notion of hypertext being inherently feminine. ""Guyer believes that hypertext--an intrinsically collabortive form as she employs it--speaks to the needs and experiences of women" (206). A couple of thins strike me here: 1. "as she employs it" is I think a significant phrase. All this talk of inherent and intrinsic qualities of hypertext make me nervous. Hypertext is always in the employ of some intention, some authority. It may slip those intentions more often than traditional text, but I think it would be a mistake to understand hypertext as inherently lliberatory in any way. 2. The very next section in the book talks about the ideal reader as "active" "aggressive" and "intrusive." I'm not an expert on the subject but if I put a generalized gender to that kind of activity I would say that it is predominantyl male. What did others make of this?

Reconfiguring Literary Education

One chief effect of electronic hypertext has been the way it challenges now-conventiona assumptions about teachers, learners, and the institutions they inhabit....It's emphasis upon the active, empowered reader, which fundamentally calls into question general assumptions about reading, writing, and texts, similarly calls into question our assumptions about the nature and institutions of literary education that so dependupon these texts (219).

While this might be true on an individual level (perhaps for Landow, perhaps not) as a general rule, I can't say that I have seen a tremendous amount of systemic change. Landow, while not calling it this, is calling for a new form of information literacy that is much talked about and little enacted (esp. in literary education). Landow argures on 220 that through read-only hypertext students will learn strategies for acquire information and patterns of thinking that emphasize associational thinking. In participatory hypertexts students are empowered and enabledto create new modes of discourse. This goes back in some way to what Collin talked about in terms of agency--the systems themselves cannot, by themselves, empower or enable. They can provide spaces and opportunities for empowerment, but simply dropping a student into a hypertext environment does not necessarily produce the desired effect.

Echo: I often listen for echoes as I read. I heard a lot of John Dewey in what Landow was proposing...especially as it related to experiental or exploratory learning.

What Landow is seeking, and the way I always read Dewey, requires a significant shift in beliefs about the value and methods of teaching. The networks and systems Landow advocates must be BUILT, CONSTRUCTED, MAINTAINED by people willing to interact, share, make connections. The specialized educational system we find ourselves in works against collaboration and connections at every turn. The isolated nature of the educational experience is firmly entrenched in the systematic and buearacratic workings of the institution.

Any "reconfinguration" as Landow woudl have it would require building something new rather than trying to tweak what already exists. The isolated nature of his own examples suggests as much. When people involved in the project leave (or aren't tenured), when something breaks down and the decision is made not to fix it, or when some new idea (or obligation) comes along we seem to revert to the novelty perception of technology. Can you tell I'm an optimist too?

The Politics of Hypertext: Who Controls the Text?

Are we in the middle of the storm now or has it already begun to calm? Challenges to tradition thinking, traditional texts, traditional values, etc. seem to generate a huge ruckus: talk shows, a flurry of legislation, cries of doom and gloom and then we quietly settle back into the way of life we are most accustomed to. The centrifugal and centripetal forces go to work on us and we swim along with or against the current.

In the end it usually ends up being much ado about nothing.

To be honest, the question of authority, authentic experience, value, good, etc. interest me but in reading Landow's last chapter I have to laugh at our self-importance. I'll let someone else take up this battle....my story has become tiresome.