Prospecting

Rhetoricians have mainly tried to integrate hypertext with existing media and forms, attempting to make the theory and practice of hypertext co-extensive with existing notions of reading, writing, and cultural practice. Thus Bolter's conclusion that "[t]he computer is simply the technology by which literacy will be carried into a new age" (1991, 237). While there is much to be said for this strategy, its value is ultimately limited. Integration stories tell us where we are in terms of where we have been. They cannot say much about what we can expect in that "new age" over the next horizon. Why should we assume that reading and writing will go on without major transformations? Bolter also tells us that hypertext means the end of literacy as it has been defined by the medium of print (p. 2).

To understand what this might mean, we have to try imagining the future. Or the present.

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