Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 19:32:20 -0500
From: Mary Ellen Pull
Subject: Re: readings for next week

Hello, I finally made time to read a bit.

The "Team Teaching" site was interesting to read. I was surprised by the student reactions--many were quite negative. I was also surprised at the "academic minimalism" as you put it, Kevin. The topics sounded fun, though. I'm sure students would rather write about the movie Braveheart than "The Kitchen."

Even though the "Rhetorics of the Web" was "visually underdeveloped," I really found it easier to read than the chats of the first piece. I guess I'm a hopeless devotee of "linearity" because I don't mind a traditional text like that. I only read half of the links, but I want to return to the site when I have time. These are the passages I found interesting:

"A Further Discussion of the Rhetorical Form of This Text"
I can't say for certain what the point is for readers, but I have found certain interesting effects as a writer. I have found that writing in this form makes one resist closure. Every node is somehow questioned, extended, and deconstructed by some other node. The relentless drive toward a conclusion, even a tentative one, that print texts seem to demand is undercut by the demands of this new form of text. Whenever a series of nodes seemed to be working their way toward a final-ish sort of claim, I found myself deliberately looking for competing options, finding opposing viewpoints, or writing metatext that would question the text I was writing. This seems to be an interesting twist on Richard Coe's assertion that form is heuristic--that certain forms focus the writer on certain modes of thought. The five-paragraph theme, Coe notes, has spawned generations of students who think that there are exactly three reasons for everything. The hypertext, I find, spawns a mindset that questions everything, sets everything in opposition to everything else. It spawns questions, resists answers.

This might be one answer, then, to my question of what role hypertext might play in discursive rhetoric. When one has a specific claim to make, hypertext may not provide much advantage over linear text except for an ability to embed longer quotations and handier references. But when one wants to explore and to question, the more radical forms of hypertext help one think (not merely write) in an exploratory mindset.

My Sunny Predictions about Electronic Text
Electronic forms of knowledge are in some ways more like orality because they are infinitely recursive. They encourage the copying, embedding and linking of texts, and make "intertextuality" a overt and visible rather than a tacit process. Although we can never return to the "tribal" knowledge of fully oral societies, the pull of the medium is away from private ownership of knowledge. Following Bolter, I claim that hypertext has the most powerful transformative potential in this regard because of its power to mix voices, to incorporate marginalia into the body of the text, and generally to blur the distinctions between one document and the next. [He gives three reasons--see comment above on 5-paragraph theme!]

Why Are There So Few Native Hypertexts on the Web?
Some of this may simply be a result of people not having become used to a new medium yet. Stuart Moulthrop suggests two more complex reasons for the presence of these buggy whips. The drag of the past is not simply a result of a few individuals being slow to move. It is endemic to any profound change of medium: Even after we have given up on print, the majority of "really electronic" text will be hopelessly contaminated with the old ways of knowing. What we must carry forward is a strong sense of foundational irony. The past is always present; we are Gutenberg creatures no matter how hard we play at revolution; there is no such thing as "non-sequential writing." We make our way by recursion, by folding a new order back upon and into its predecessor. ("Getting over the Edge")

Elsewhere he sees a more political motive:
Compare the print paper to a truly multi-linear hypertext where the writer explores with equal discursive value the ambiguities and alternative hypotheses that derive from her research. Depending on their interactions with the text, subsequent readers might form very different conclusions about the researcher's findings, making it impossible to represent her article in terms of a simple, particular proposition. If the article cannot be thus represented, it cannot effectively contribute to the stream of citations from which technical consensus emerges. Its intertextuality is simply too pronounced, or its focus too weak, to serve the dialectical process of science-in-action. This, then, is why hypertext researchers do not work primarily in hypertext: because the work we do and the institutions in which we work are both hierarchical, and because a fully realized or "native" hypertext is incompatible with hierarchical discourse. ("Shadow of an Informand") Well, maybe. Or maybe the medium is simply not very friendly to argumentative rhetoric."

Me again-- Kevin, I really like your idea of a "meal" motif. Quite creative! More later,

Mary

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