Jay David Bolter devotes most of Chapter 6 in his book Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print<\/em> to the implications of hypertext for writers and writing in particular.\u00a0 \u201cIf linear and hierarchical structures dominate current writing, our cultural construction of electronic writing is now adding a third: the network as a visible and operative structure\u201d (106).\u00a0 Bolter acknowledges the network as a very ancient \u201corganizing principle\u201d of writing; now, Bolter maintains, the network can \u201crise to the surface\u201d of the text.<\/p>\n Bolter continues to illustrate how hypertext has the potential to be non-linear, non-hierarchical, interactive, and dialogic.\u00a0 Bolter is interested in the writer\u2019s perspective, but the implication is equally clear for the reader, who is freed from a traditionally passive role.\u00a0 Gunther Kress is gleeful about the social effects of this power newly offered to the reader:<\/p>\n The screen offers the facility in ways that the book did not . . . \u00a0for the reader to become author . . .\u00a0 I can change the text that comes to me on the screen. . . . That factor, of course, brings about a radical change to notions of authority: When everyone can be an author authority is severely challenged. The social frames that had supported the figure of the author have disappeared or are disappearing and with that the force of social power that vested authority in the work of the author (19).<\/p>\n The overall picture they paint is of collapsing walls and expanding vistas – a new era of possibility in writing and reading facilitated by digital technology, in which their user or audience invoked invariably has both full access and unfettered use.\u00a0 Their enthusiasm is shared by many theorists and users.<\/p>\n But while theorists re-imagine the structure of text and its implications for writing in hyperspace, and the flower children of the world wide web \u2018reach out\u2019 to each other in an orgy of blogging and friend-making, institutions and bureaucracies discover their own uses for new technologies.\u00a0 In the realm of forms and official documents, where traditionally the roles of writer and reader meet and cross, the digital environment is increasingly used to enforce separation and inflexibility.<\/p>\n Bolter and Kress overlook the traditionally non-linear and non-hierarchical possibilities in these types of writing, which are lost as they become electronic.\u00a0 In what was one of the few aspects of print where the reader could talk back as writer, the relationship between text and reader has become increasingly rigid, unidirectional, even dictatorial.\u00a0 The reader\u2019s traditional power to resist the writer\u2019s agenda by leaving demands unanswered, writing complex responses across divides of restrictively small spaces, commenting in margins or on the back of the sheet, and so on, has been eliminated.<\/p>\n In a digital age and environment the aims of the designers of a form or template can finally find their fullest realization.\u00a0 The freedom of the reader to resist a passive role, to step beyond reactive compliance, to write what is<\/em> rather than what is expected, accepted, acknowledged, or allowed, can at last be effectively curtailed.<\/p>\n The result is an increasing occurrence of online and electronic forms – surveys, reports, applications, evaluations, purchase orders, and many others – in which the user\u2019s options are severely limited. Many of these are driven by economic interests; among them a desire to save considerable expense on data collection and analysis, and a cultural preference everywhere from academia to industry to government, for quantitative information.\u00a0 Opportunities to comment are available at the discretion of a form\u2019s author, but may also reflect bias, as in the case of a university department reviewing its programs, which included 13 open comment fields in its survey of faculty and two in its survey of students[i]<\/a>. Others are filled with responses from a prepared set, rather than individually composed; an example is report card software with \u2018comment libraries\u2019, which may serve a perceived desire for consistency (uniformity?) and be intended to save time, but also limit the reader\/author to saying only those things which the author\/reader deemed appropriate or thought to include.\u00a0 Ironically, this environment is powerfully reminiscent of Kress\u2019 characterization of traditional print, in which \u201c[o]rder is firmly coded\u201d (7).<\/p>\n Figure 1: An example of fields in a form designed using an online survey utility.<\/span><\/p>\n In this example of an online form[ii]<\/a>, the Full name<\/em> field allows only 25 characters – fewer than this user needs.\u00a0 Date of<\/em> birth<\/em> is required, and for Gender<\/em> choices are the traditional male or female.\u00a0 The potential negative effects are clear.\u00a0 Certain elements of the user\u2019s reality are denied as possibilities: a long name; a non-traditional gender identity; uncertainty about date of birth – unimaginable in Western culture, but common in many places; in regard to any facet of interrogation, a desire to maintain privacy.\u00a0 Answers for which the form\u2019s author has made no provision – for whatever reason – may be rejected as an \u2018Invalid Response\u2019.<\/p>\n Even the pop-up box directing the user to complete required fields allows only one response \u2013 \u2018OK\u2019.\u00a0 Many such \u2018interfaces\u2019 offer only a few pre-scripted responses \u2013 e.g. \u2018now\u2019 or \u2018later\u2019, for an action which the user may not wish to take at all.<\/p>\n These requirements and omissions can create alienation, barriers to service, and misunderstandings or misrepresentations through relying on information so gathered.\u00a0 The denial in a single form of alternative gender identity may seem trivial, but in both language and statistics that which is not named appears not to exist. \u00a0When this question appears so in, for example, a census form, the statement to citizens from government is that it recognizes no other gender identities.\u00a0 And any law or social policy based on the data would reflect only these two possibilities.<\/p>\n The cumulative effect is, as Neil Postman presciently wrote in 1992, that \u201c[t]heir private matters have been made more accessible to powerful institutions.\u00a0 They are more easily tracked and controlled; are subject to more examinations; are increasingly mystified by the decisions made about them; are often reduced to mere numerical objects\u201d (10).<\/p>\n Compare these characteristics of electronic forms with this traditional paper example.<\/p>\n Figure 2: Calgary School Board high school reporting form, completed in December 1920.<\/span><\/p>\n The Calgary School Board has indicated how it wants teachers to report on the Progress, Attendance and Deportment<\/em> of students.\u00a0 DEPORTMENT<\/em> is given prominence with bold uppercase, but not one teacher who contributed to this pupil\u2019s report chose to comment in that column[iii]<\/a>.\u00a0 Teachers have made the priority of deportment to them<\/em> just as clear as has the school board.<\/p>\n Though this may seem trivial, it has significant potential to convey shifting priorities, and to resist bureaucratic dictation at the \u2018front lines\u2019 of work.\u00a0 Similarly the record left for history reveals both what was elicited and what was produced – and the nature of any gap between them.<\/p>\n My Grandfather\u2019s House<\/strong><\/p>\n Personal mementos also suffer a loss of dimension in entering the digital world.\u00a0 Most people have had the experience of looking through old family papers and photographs \u2013 finding yellowed letters and dog-eared snapshots of parents and grandparents and even great-grandparents.\u00a0 Many interesting insights come through pieces that were not necessarily saved for posterity; they are often the unexpected fruit of incidental artefacts, items filed temporarily and then forgotten.<\/p>\n It is almost reflexive – at least for older people[iv]<\/a> – to turn photos over and look on the back for a name, date, place, or some other glimpse into their origins.\u00a0 Although we think of these images on paper as having but two dimensions, they in effect have three \u2013 the \u2018back story\u2019 adds depth, sometimes well beyond the words themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 Handwriting may be recognized, giving context to incomplete, vague or cryptic notes.\u00a0 \u201cGrandpa MacDougall\u2019s house\u201d describing a photo leaves questions lingering in type that are answered by your grandmother\u2019s distinctive script. A photographer\u2019s imprint, the photo paper, film lab\u2019s package or mailer, even a frame or an album and mounting materials add context.\u00a0 Their absence is more than merely a loss in the tactile element of documentary history.<\/p>\n The example below of a Kodak slide mailer shows some of the insight and context that may be provided quite incidentally.<\/p>\n Figure 3: Kodak photo processing return mailer, 1959.<\/span><\/p>\n The photographer, most likely the addressee, lived in Edmonton, Alberta (his residence can be pinpointed on a map should a researcher wish to do so).\u00a0 Those who knew him well could also identify him here by his handwriting.\u00a0 The postmark gives an approximate date to the photographs within – July 1959.\u00a0 At that time this little package – measuring about 11cm x 6cm x 1.5 cm – could be sent by letter post for eight cents, from Toronto (suggesting that Kodak had no labs closer than that to Edmonton).\u00a0 By looking at the photos themselves one can learn also that he is a skilled photographer, with high standards – as evidenced by the quality of the photos, and the fact that in spite of it he has noted on the back of the box, \u201cBIRDS.\u00a0 Not good<\/span>\u201d – and with a tendency to keep even his unsatisfactory work carefully filed.<\/p>\n Letters are likewise filled with information beyond what the words themselves convey, encoded in handwriting, illustrations, paper, envelope, postage, postmark, stamp, layout of page and density of writing, and any additional marks such as seals, recipient\u2019s notations (handwritten or stamped), and any scars of passage.<\/p>\n It is likely that the almost complete digitization of personal communication in some parts of the world will soon result in, among other things, a generation of children who may never have received a personal letter by post, are even less likely to have written one, and very possibly would not recognize the handwriting of any but their closest family members.\u00a0 Casual interpersonal communication is generated at an ever accelerating rate but is increasingly ephemeral and without context.\u00a0 Even formal letters now rarely include the traditional header providing date and place of their writing, and email messages are characterized by casual style that often omits even a salutation.<\/p>\n As explained by handwriting expert Rosemary Sassoon, \u201c[a]n individual sample of handwriting reflects the writer\u2019s training, character and environment.\u00a0 Collectively, the handwriting of a population of any period is a reflection of educational thinking, but overall it is influenced and ultimately moulded by economic need, social habits and contemporary taste\u201d (9).\u00a0 On a personal level handwriting can be powerfully evocative, especially the writing of someone loved but no longer living.\u00a0 Bolter and Kress and their fellow enthusiasts apparently overlook the fact that writing, produced by the human hand, inherently straddles the divide between text and image, conveying both literal meaning and at least a few hundred of the proverbial \u2018thousand words\u2019 of pictorial richness.<\/p>\n Ultimately, the effect of digital media on personal memento may be quite the opposite of what its proponents have expected and declared.\u00a0 Rather than the facilitation and proliferation of unique and personal archives and aides-m\u00e9moire<\/em>, the result may be an increasing bulk of material with ever fewer individualizing characteristics.<\/p>\n Ecological Change<\/strong><\/p>\n Writers such as Bolter discuss traditional prose, fiction and non-fiction and academic writing, while others are interested in myriad ways of using hypertext to expand the possibilities of educational materials, artistic expression, personal memoir, alternative approaches to publishing, and implications for copyright, collaboration and cultural entitlement.\u00a0 While the advantages they see in hypertext are real for all these forms, and while the forms discussed in this essay differ significantly in structure and function, they are all part of a larger social whole.\u00a0 What are the implications for a society in which people are able to express themselves with ever greater flexibility and variety in creative ways but quite the opposite in their interactions with the state; and in which personal memento becomes increasingly ephemeral, two dimensional, and homogeneous?\u00a0 Such questions are inevitable, as Neil Postman recognized, \u201cwhen one grasps, as Thamus did, that . . . it is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity. . . .\u00a0 Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive.\u00a0 It is ecological.\u201d (18).<\/p>\n —————————————————————————————————————-<\/p>\n [ii]<\/a> Designed specifically for illustrative purposes for this essay, using the commercial online survey utility Vovici EFM Feedback.<\/p>\n![\"required](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/files\/2009\/12\/required-fields.jpg\" "\\"required")
<\/p>\n![\"ray_report_dec-1920\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/files\/2009\/12\/ray_report_dec-1920.jpg\" "\\"ray_report_dec-1920\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"slide_mailer\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/files\/2009\/12\/slide_mailer.jpg\" "\\"slide_mailer\\"")
<\/p>\n![\"photo_back\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/etec540sept09\/files\/2009\/12\/photo_back.jpg\" "\\"photo_back\\"")
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[i]<\/a> An actual case, presumably reflecting the attitudes and assumptions of the department, which shall of course remain nameless.\u00a0 The decisions made were probably not calculated, nor are they unusual.<\/p>\n