Computers, Writing, Rhetoric and Literature
Differing With Virginia: A Self Representation
- In
preparation for the Computers and Writing Conference in El Paso in May 1995, I
became a writerly reader by choice. I decided to co-author in hypertext a small
piece of Virginia Anderson's new detective fiction, which was in its early stages
of invention. Virginia Anderson and I are both graduate students in rhetoric and
composition at the University of Texas at Austin, and Virginia was enrolled in
Professor John Slatin's graduate class on computers and English studies. Having
thought some already about hypertext and writer/reader relationships, I welcomed
this opportunity to experiment with making Virginia's text "our" text. Because
the disciplinary culture of computers and composition admits warmly all amateur
grapplings with new technologies and because it values experiential knowledge (we
all have years of amateurism and new experience in store), I felt safe in doing
so. Virginia's and my relationship outside this text was, however, neither
straightforwardly equal nor unequal. She and I are both graduate students in
rhetoric and composition. We are both female. I am older than Virginia; she has
more teaching, work, and publishing experience. We found ourselves equals in
technical literacy, as both were novices in hypertext writing. But because
Virginia is a published author of fiction, I felt as Annie to Paul in Misery.
- When I first approached the project to perform writerly reading, I
found that Virginia had already dotted the landscape with marks of ownership.
She took the first turn, she made the first cards, and she thereby, inadvertently
or not, left open for me the familiar subject position of respondent. In
addition, she wrote in a genre I had no knowledge of--detective fiction--and in a
"creative writing" style that I have neither practice nor talent in. She
established some differences between us. Finally, Virginia made screens for
me--nicely done--aligned carefully alongside hers. But hers were on the left,
where Western readers always begin, and mine were slightly smaller. With clear
hindsight I can see that I might have complemented Virginia's small moves by
writing to her sideways via links to her text, making screens for her commentary
on my work, but my literacy training as a writing teacher dictated another sort
of writing. In fact, I was speechless, unable to compose a word, until Virginia
revealed her difficulty with a particular character in her fiction, putting
herself in what Deborah Tannen calls a "one-down" position and initiating a
familiar, gendered, conversational ritual. Virginia wrote:
I know
what [character] Ben looks like; I worry that he will not be sympathetic. I want
him to be driven.
- Rather than take over and develop
Ben's character, as I might have, I accessed my storehouse of knowledge about
composing processes and slipped into the familiar role of writer's helper,
praising Virginia for opening up her writing process woes for my inspection.
"Virginia, this really helps. Now you are letting me inside you as author. . . .
," I wrote. Later , still playing writing teacher, I tried to show some
technical expertise by using Hypercard terminology:
I was expecting a
visual here--with an "iris open" link and . . . on the next screen, where the
excavation begins, I would expect some sound: chinking . . . .
- Eventually, feeling frustrated and trapped by my self-imposed,
non-invasive, you-own-the-text-and-I-am-hear-to-assist-you habits, I threatened
an intolerable invasion of Virginia's text: I said I would go into her screen
and move words and sentences and around. Horrified, Virginia countered
eloquently with her version of hypertext theory:
BUT why is it not
okay to make copies to play with and have two versions, mine and yours? Are
these concepts somehow fascist? . . . I am not sure why this has to be
agonistic . . . . I was thinking this morning . . . about the COMPETITION in
this situation. . . . . Indeed, if you as reader efface what I have previously
done, where is the dividing line between collaboration and usurpation . . . I
was thinking about metonymic ethics. About an ethics in which different versions
stand beside each other rather than in front of each other. It has always seemed
to me that the beauty of this ethic is that it allows both versions to speak . . .
- It became apparent that once Virginia owned the text,
having paid for it by her hard work and demonstrated excellence (after all, she
is a published author), she wanted to define the face and form of collaboration
carefully. "Link," she told me, "make your own card," she said, "but don't touch
my stuff." I began to suspect that the allure of hypertext --its motivational
grounding--is neither the abandonment of hierarchy nor abolishment of modernist
sensibilities but rather the accommodation of both.
Representing Readers and Writers: Web People
- Historians of the
book go about investigating the history of reading by asking some of the same
questions that cyberwriters do--questions about access, demographics, and
readership practices. They have found, for example, that in the late eighteenth
century, reading increased across social classes and that instead of reading a
few books over and over, readers began to read many books, but each book only
once. Historian Robert Darnton suggests that the variety of literate practices
expanded as well during this period. People began to read for personal and
professional reasons, for information and entertainment, for negotiating everyday
life and for spiritual enrichment. Cyberreaders' reasons for reading surely are
diverse (hence the battles over what is appropriate Web fare for different
readerships). Not only do cyberreaders tend to read text only once, they tend to
dispose of it after consumption. They worry that online reading will not
increase across social classes, and indeed perhaps accessibility and cross-class
readership will remain a strength of book culture alone.
- Historians
of the book typically cast their nets wide for information about literacy and
class, literacy and gender, literacy and ethnicity, literacy and power. They
consult publishing house and reading club records, circulation data from public
libraries, and catalogues of private libraries, just as Web-culture watchers
consult the MIDS website for estimates of numbers of Interment users and gender
ratios. However, book historians have found little from their sources about how
readers read, how the relationship between writers and readers is constructed,
how reading practices translate to other social practices. For this information
they rely upon images, reader's journals, and, sometimes, writer's instructions
to their readers (writers' pedagogies). Teachers of cyberliteracies are
fortunate to have raw material at their disposal. They may turn introspective or
anthropological, watching themselves and each other, interviewing and
eavesdropping on their students. They may reread their own words on syllabi and
assignments for subtle encodings of reader/writer relationships.
- My
adventure with Virginia tells me that writing in hypertext, as well as reading,
is about linking. Virginia noted:
I am tending to get caught up in
making links and looking for various stacks rather than in writing. I'm not sure
how productive that is.
I read attentively Virginia's
ambivalence about the time invested in linking and sorting because she may well
forecast the new focus for teachers of web literacy. Virginia is working on a
stand-alone project, yet her forced obsession with links surely mirrors literate
activity on the World Wide Web.
- Reading the Web entails the
mechanical ability to scan quickly, fix on highlighted terms or clickable maps,
and perform a finger tap. Never has reading so recommended itself to students,
who are beamed from site to site and are treated to display after display. But
wait! The passive verbs in the sentence I just wrote do not correspond to
official theory, which names online reading an active event. Indeed, does one
travel the Web or is one transported? Is reading online a matter of hunting or
gathering, of gorging or being nourished, of building or culling? Is it
espionage or voyeurism or consumption? What do these terms imply about
reader/writer relationship?
- If linking is Burkean and signals
identification--one page with another, one writer with another, still, how are we
to understand the nature of the constructed relationship? What meaning do we
invest in linkages? Does a highlighted term indicate a thread-like bond,
tentative and fragile? Does it signify a relationship painstakingly spliced
together? A friendship? A one-night stand? Is it the performance of a blood
ritual, a polite handshake, or a casual high five? What has been the genesis,
the development, and the sustenance of the relationship? What is its history?
How does a writerly-reader like Annie Wilkes overwrite a contestable association
except by the nongesture of nonlinking?
- It is an understatement that
computers change literacy practices. Hypertext enacts poststructural theory
(Poster); hypertext democratizes culture (Lanham); hypertext faces off with the
"[print] beast that cannot die" (Moulthrop 263): These are statements from our
stock of lore. We know these songs by heart. They are the cliches of the
netpeople, whose relationships surely merit careful representation. Our
understatement remains underexamined.
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