New Internet writing environments differ significantly from print forms. They allow texts to evolve-to change their purpose and audience over time. They allow for new forms of collaboration-texts organize themselves without an omniscient editor shaping them. As a profession, we need to understand and experiment with these forms.
collaborative writing composition genre theory hypertext writing pedagogy
What is unnatural in print becomes natural in the electronic medium and will soon no longer need saying at all, because it can be shown.
-Jay David Bolter Writing Space
At major transition points, where one platform or genre gives way to another, the older form invariably strains to approximate the rhythms and mannerisms of the emergent form. There is something almost primal, almost irresistible about this pull, like a field of sunflowers leaning toward the light of a new day. The older medium wants to reinvent itself-chrysalis-style-in the image of the new, but its existing conventions won't allow such a dramatic transformation.
-Stephen Johnson Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate Computers and computer network technology are in the process of drastically reconfiguring the ways we do our work in the academy and in the world at large. The signs are everywhere, and unmistakable; a cursory review of various print and electronic publications shows more evidence than I can list here. But, consider the following: (a) In the February, 1997 issue of College Composition and Communication, Joseph Harris (1997) called for the journal to develop a presence on the World Wide Web, (b) Educom, an electronic journal reporting technology developments of interest to scholars, reported on February 28 that scientists were considering new methods of peer review, methods that would take advantage of the immediately dialogic nature of Internet communication, (c) Economist Peter Drucker, interviewed in a Forbes' article by Robert Lenzer and Stephen S. Johnson (1997), said about distance education that "already we are beginning to deliver more lectures and classes off campus via satellite or two-way video at a fraction of the cost. The college won't survive as a residential institution. Today's buildings are hope-