Polymers , Paranoia , and the Rhetoric of Hypertext

Abstract

The development of interactive writing systems has now proceeded far enough to engage humanist academics and theorists, who were largely absent from the technical phases of the creation. Now that hypertexts and hypertext systems are becoming common, academics are rushing to theorize about these new communications tools, often in the name of rhetoric. But this is no easy task. Those who would create a rhetoric for hypertext must be prepared to thoroughly reconsider their subject: as Jay Bolter points out, forms of electronic text production threaten the definitions of good writing and careful reading established by the culture of the printing press (2). The rhetoric of hypertext requires substantial re-thinking. Print endows writing with stability, authority, and artifactual integrity. Books in their highest form, as Alvin Kernan instructed, are ordered, controlled, teleological, referential, and meaningful (141). But it is difficult to find these attributes in hypertext. Concepts like order, control and teleology seem of limited application in non-sequential writings, which after all can embrace elliptical and even contradictory expressions (Nelson, 5 /2). Likewise, since hypertexts favor a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance, they are less likely to operate denotatively or referentially, as an exclusive description of reality, than as a form of simulation, exploring hypotheses and contingencies. And of course it is impossible to regard any interactive text as autonomously meaningful since the text achieves expression only through interaction with its user /respondents. The functional and experiential bases of hypertext differ substantially from those of the book. Nonetheless, most rhetorics of electronic writing proposed to date still