Volume 1, Number 1
These essays grew out of conference presentations, which in turn emerged from conversations in the Computer Writing and Research Lab. The authors, Daniel Anderson, Albert Rouzie, and Susan Warshauer, presented their papers at the Computers and Writing Conference at the University of Missouri-Columbia in May. Rouzie retains the form of the traditional essay. Anderson and Warshauer have chosen a more experimental form, (re)writing their conference papers specifically for publication on the World Wide Web. This approach allows Anderson, in particular, to play with the notion of the essay and the kinds of coherence it conventionally enjoins.
It has been almost five years since Marcia Peoples Halio published her provocative critique of the Macintosh (January, 1990), arguing that its graphical interface encouraged a frivolous conception of writing as pleaseant but meaningless play with fonts and graphics and decoration while the austere, text-based interface of the IBM embodied a more appropriate conception of writing as serious business. The Mac-IBM controversy is pretty well moot now, of course, thanks to the massive dominance of Microsoft's Windowsª and the triumph of the graphical user interface. We've come a long way in five years. Or so it would be nice to think. But the fundamental issues remain, as these essays make clear.
What they make most abundantly clear, for me at least, is how much the notion of "good writing" has changed-- and how much traditional notions retain their force even as the medium changes. Anderson celebrates the pedagogical value of hypertext's ability to integrate text and graphics, for example, while also critiquing his own production as well as his students' work in HyperCardª; Anderson also plays off the differences between these "local" hypertexts and his own use of the World Wide Web. Rouzie and Warshauer, by contrast, concentrate on written interactions as they occur in the "real time" of virtual spaces like Daedalus InterChangeª (Rouzie) or AcademICK and Point MOOt, two MUDs operating at the University of Texas at Austin (Warshauer). In these intensely social environments, the tensions between rhetorical playfulness and rhetorical seriousness take on a different cast, an explicitly ethical one. Discussing the practice of "flaming," or what he more disturbingly calls "wilding," Rouzie argues that "the virtual space of [Daedalus] InterChange seems to undercut writers' positionality and free[s] them to some degree from ethical constraints"-- a problem that surfaces in the more fully elaborated virtual space of the MOO where traditional distinctions collapse and even Brenda Laurel's poetics of interface, with its Aristotelian center, may not hold in a world where actor, audience, reader, and writer are one.
There is, then, a community of interest here, a core of common concern, a conversation that is many conversations. It is this conversation that animates the basement rooms that house the real-life Computer Writing and Research Lab and makes it a joy to be there. We invite you to join.
Page: "Pairings"
Copyright (c) 1994