For a question addressing ephemeral space, Wendy's is strikingly physical. She asks that we accept concrete metaphors of architecture and urban landscape as starting points for locating ourselves in an abstract realm. Is this kind of conceptual slippage inherent to the medium or due to the awkwardness of language that accompanies a new technology?

"AS A (W)READER"¹

In discussions of hypertext fiction, much is often made of the "active involvement" of the reader. The making of meaning in cyberspace rests heavily on this so-called reader, specifically in the relationships among the texts she chooses — out of which the she must make her own particular sense. It is perhaps for this reason that the word "user" is sometimes substituted for "reader."

"Using" may be a more appropriate term for what one does in cyberspace anyway. One reason is the relative youth of the media itself. As Marshall McLuhan explains, we have so internalized the apparatus of print (turning pages; silently reading, line by line, a physically homogenous text) that the technology has taken on a kind of "transparency," whereby we do not "see" a book as a technology per se. The heterogeneity and visual non-uniformity of some hypertext can prevent one from achieving the kind of direct, physically dis-associative communication that print media has come to enable. Michael Joyce puts it succinctly when he writes, "text on the screen is conspicuously non-print."² Accordingly, where one must actively use relatively unfamiliar apparatus (keyboard, monitor, mouse) to engage with hypertext, "reading" is again not quite an accurate term. One is reminded, also, that "user" suggests a very different relationship to text than does "reader." A relationship, I think, which is infused with a strong sense of consumerism.

While the kind of sense the reader makes in cyberspace may be aggressively mediated by the literal aspects of the computer terminal, the sources of the information one reads (or uses) may be less mediated in that they need not necessarily be processed by publishers, editors, corporate interests, etc. This is of course untrue of plenty of sites (including How2), whose hierarchies operate similarly to that of a print publication. Nonetheless, for those with access to the equipment, self-publishing and access to self-published work has never been easier, and certain levels of corporate mediation, at least, may be bypassed.

Joshua Meyrowitz has argued (of television) that unprecedented access to information, the specificities of the world outside, the "private" lives of other people, has eroded our "sense of place."³ Meyrowitz's idea seems especially relevant to cyberspace, where the parameters of social geography are mental (or technological). In a realm where the idea of place is even less stable than in those of other media, it becomes tricky to "locate" ourselves in the old sense of identification with either a physical or an ideological position. But there may be other possibilities, ways more suited to the medium.

Marcos Novak writes, "I combine words and occupy places that are the consequences of my words."⁴ But this is perhaps only fully true if one completely understands the structures one is working with and within. Once, information was external to a reader; now, when we use the web, we say we are "in" the information — or "on" it, implying that we can stay afloat on (even surf!) this vast sea by using our "navigator" to make our chosen connections. The threat of consumption is palpable, especially to one not trained in computer science. The temptation to respond reflexively by consuming can be powerful.

In cyberspace, as in real life, one must choose "locations," sites for one's selves to reside. But in the context of Wendy's question, we cannot simply locate ourselves "as readers and writers," because, in a textually based cyberspace, everyone is a reader, a writer, or both. And we cannot claim to locate ourselves in identity because the very idea of the unitary self has been weakened or undermined by postcolonial and feminist theories (among others) and even by the processes of cyberspace. As Judith Butler and others have exposed the social construction of gender, post-colonial studies has insisted upon a notion of "individual subjectivity that is defined in terms of multiple subject positions"⁵ based on experiences of migration, mimicry, and crises of cultural identity. Both point to a mutable, decentered subject, one which resembles Donna Harraway's well known "cyborg."⁶ Haraway argues that communications and biotechnology reduce bodies (bodies of knowledge and corporeal bodies) to coding, which are then subject to disassembling, reconstruction, and transformation. The techno-body brings about a new subjectivity (the cyborg), which takes for granted the erosion of boundaries between body and machine. If we accept these ideas on subjectivity, our means of location must then be flexible, multiple, and able to simultaneously encompass many variables. I would like to suggest that we try to "locate" our places on the web in terms of consumption and production. Not by declaring, "I am a consumer" or "I am a producer," but in action. For example, I locate my connection to feminism as a historically based position from which I act rather than a "natural" connection to an essential womanhood. Analogously, I hope to locate myself in cyberspace as one of the producers of its structures. And in doing so, if I recognize Harraway's manifesto, I locate myself as one of those structures. But unlike in the physical world, where "structure" implies rigidity, the structural "locations" I imagine remain in flux. When my piece of the structure disappears, another takes its place. And in this I can remain always flexible, and do not recognize inherent hierarchical positions (such as those associated with print text) because any given location equals any other.

As a writer

The next step then, it seems, is to locate oneself as a writer. I mean this not in the "type and click" sense, but as a practical response to being overwhelmed by a cyber-scape in which one only visits sites that have already been constructed. This is my response to Wendy's final question about the "trans-physical city of language." It is a stunningly beautiful idea, but one that doesn't seem likely as more and more hypertext writings are only available on CDROM (through such companies as Eastgate),⁷ and access to sites is controlled internally by tagging and meta-tagging; externally, by the threat of censorship, either legislative or local (e.g. bosses, parents); and economically, by access to computer knowledge and equipment (not to mention the "free" [non-earning] time it takes to create).

The idea that the audience helps construct the text is not particular to hypertext (Derrida wrote it; so did Shakespeare). It is the visual manifestation of collaboration that makes hypertext so exciting. Electronic texts "expose the patchwork" of our lives,⁸ and it is this very mutability and fragmentation that hypertext readers and writers seem to find compelling. But the state of fragmentation can be embodied by print; what is a footnote if not a kind of hypertext?

I think if we "as writers" want to locate ourselves in the way writers generally want to be located, that is to say, in a way which will be both fresh and noticed, we must open our ideas of writing to the specific ways hypertext differs from print. Since I am a newcomer to hypertext, those aspects that interest me are relatively basic. At the most obvious level, hypertext can engage multiple senses, allowing image, sound, and even touch to emerge from or interact with or morph into or from text.

Secondly, the sense of parallel and perpendicular universes in the vast network of cyberspace imparts a feeling of profound interconnectedness, a "holistic" approach to text which might begin to subvert the Romantic notion of the isolated, subjective artist.

Related to this, cyberspace may help enable the deconstruction of the authority of presence, and therefore undermine hierarchies based on body or location in the physical world. In cyberspace, any presence is potentially tenuous, prone to (or even dependent upon) trickster shape-changing and transformation. There can be no claims to "natural" or even identity-based authority where nothing "is" but only "seems." This can bring a delightful playfulness to hypertext writing, even as it may precipitate a serious crisis regarding what-is-to-be-believed.

And in a space of subverted authority and nonlinear time (in that many worlds [realms — representations] of "time" may run simultaneously in cyberspace), what is the place of memory? What can we call memory if seeming is being? Or will we start to think in new ways about randomness and patterns, in the ways we think long-term about history? I hope so.

Finally, in hypertext I see representation of an almost hyper-realism. Hypertext can reflect the tension one feels amidst constant adaptation and change, whereby quotidian shatterings are nonetheless grouped coherently enough by our brains so that we make peace (however tenuous) with its pieces and live as we must as "intentional beings."⁹ And, as in any medium where this tension is realized and reflected, we can find art.

Notes

1. "The nature of [hypertext] transforms the meaning of the word 'reader.' No one has found the right noun yet...some have tried 'wreader,' many make due with 'user.'" Guyer, Carolyn, in "Page Versus Pixel." FEED Magazine. <www.feedmag.com/95.05dialog1.html>

2. Joyce, Michael, in "Page vs. Pixel." FEED Magazine. <www.feedmag.com/95.05dialog1.html>

3. "'Sense' referring to both perception and logic and 'place' meaning both social position and physical location." Meyrowitz, Joshua. "No Sense of Place: the impact of electronic media on social behavior", in The Media Reader, eds. MacKay, Hugh and Tim O'Sullivan. London: Sage, 1999 (100). 

4. Novak, Marcus. "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace", in Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Benedikt, Michael. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1991 (229). 

5. Odin, Jaishree K. "The Electronic Revolution." (www.svpa.hawaii.edu/aln/lit_imp.htm>

6. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifest: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 

7. While I recognize that writers of every media must make a living, I can't help hoping for a way to distribute hypertext writings that doesn't mirror the present world of print publishing, in a way that both respects and protects the writers and allows as many readers as possible to enjoy their work. 

8. Joyce, Michael. "Forms of Future." <media-in-tansition.mit.edu/articles joyces.html> 

9. Turkle, Sherry, "Identity in the Age of Internet" in The Media Reader, eds. MacKay, Hugh and Tim O'Sullivan. London: Sage, 1999 (292).