Kaplan explains the purpose of her essay: "I want to interrogate the future of literacy both its electronic formations (if indeed these differ from its pre-electronic ones) and its social origins and effects." That is, she undertakes to examine how the new media may impact on literacy, and she also raises some concerns about new forms of elitism that are being produced by such media. Her argument in some respects depends on a version of social constructivism, i.e., that the forces that determine how a technology develops also control how it will be used. I find this aspect of her argument unconvincing. At the same time, the warnings she raises about the impact of the new technology are timely and challenging. We have to consider the cultural conditions of the new medium, not just its technical imperatives. As she notes, mentioning both enthusiasts and critics of the new media, "by ignoring the social, Bolter and Lanham as well as Tuman and Postman fail to articulate some crucial relations between technologies and cultures." I address only a small part of her interesting discussion in this commentary.

I begin with the observation that Kaplan falls into the same error as other hypertext theorists (cf. the critique of Grusin, 1996). She attributes agency to the hypertext medium. Here are three examples:

A significant feature of hypertext environments is their capacity for inclusion: they want to construct vast and necessarily unfinished collages of documents to represent the knowledge (and the agon) of a discipline.

the proclivities of electronic texts -- at least to the extent that we can determine what they are -- manifest themselves only as fully as human beings and their institutions allow

Can we really accept that hypertexts have "wants" or "proclivities"? This, of course, reproduces one of the common postmodern assumptions about language, that as a system it "speaks" us rather than being a medium through which we speak. At the same time, Kaplan's attribution of agency is at odds with her main argument, that

our present social and economic relations, our implicit ideologies -- complete with fissures and inconsistencies -- form the conditions in which the technologies and techniques for their use are defined and developed.

In other words, hypertext is an outcome of the cultural and technological forces within which it emerged. If we now attribute agency to hypertext, then it must have become a kind of Frankenstein monster to which we have given life, but which is now beyond our control. Such a myth will only obscure the real questions with which hypertext confronts us. Hypertext, I would argue, like other tools, has only such power as we bestow upon it.

But, more generally, does hypertext technology drive what it is possible to do with it? This seems a common, McLuhanite assumption. But I'm not so sure. Consider the sonnet as a type of technology of the poem: if I decide to write one I have to keep within the parameters of the form, but how far does this actually determine what I can say? While I can't, obviously, write some things, such as an account of the Battle of Borodino (as in War and Peace), the form itself places few constraints on content. Why should the formal properties of hypertext call for a different type of content from regular text because hypertext is a new medium? On the other hand, I know that reading (say) Hegirascope differs considerably from a regular novel. But is this because of the hypertext medium itself or because Moulthrop keeps pushing the reading from the server? (an incidental phenomenon, not essential to hypertext as a medium). Isn't it rather a difference in emphasis that hypertext makes possible? While the non-linear dimensions of text were always there (realized more or less by each reader), with hypertext we are now able to foreground these and exploit them deliberately. This will tend to suit some kinds of writing more than others.

Kaplan quotes from Postman, who complains that electronic text is de-socializing:

In introducing the personal computer to the classroom, we shall be breaking a four-hundred year-old truce between the gregariousness and openness fostered by orality and the introspection and isolation fostered by the printed word. Orality stresses group learning, cooperation, and a sense of social responsibility . . .

Print stresses individualized learning, competition, and personal autonomy. Over four centuries, teachers, while emphasizing print, have allowed orality its place in the classroom, and have therefore achieved a kind of pedagogical peace between these two forms of learning, so that what is valuable in each can be maximized. Now comes the computer, carrying anew the banner of private learning and individual problem-solving. Will the widespread use of computers in the classroom defeat once and for all the claims of communal speech? (p. 17)

This seems misdirected to me, as an analysis of the use of print in education. For example, Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, points out how often students have complained that professors inhibit or prevent meaningful discussion of literary texts, or require classroom work that evades the central issues presented by the text (e.g., the philological framework of early USA English literature classes). One student I have worked with, Karen Manarin, has been examining the use of extracts from Wordsworth in nineteenth century textbooks for high schools: it is clear that monologic practices (in Bakhtin's sense) have predominated. Orality in this context is a golden age myth. For further discussion, see my recent article "Empowering the reader: Literary response and classroom learning," in which I describe some of the more unfortunate practices in schools that present day students of English report.

Kaplan continues (after this Postman extract):

In the same vein, we ask: How will the computer affect literacy? What aspects of literacy will have to be re-formed?

Framed that way, such questions distort the matter at hand, for the relations between the multiple literacies of late twentieth century, post-industrial culture and the multiple material objects, attendant practices, routines and instruction sets constituting what we lump under the heading computer are exceedingly complex and interdependent. Neither the practices constituting literacy nor those constituting computing provide a stable anchor for historical analysis since both are constantly moving, shifting in response to each other's pressures.

If this is correct (and I'm inclined to agree with Kaplan here), the question is clearly more complex than supposing that, as we now know about literacy, we must monitor the effect of computing on it. In fact, we still know rather little about "literacy" in its wider sense: this is a name for a multitude of skills, dispositions, cultural affordances, leisure habits, etc. The computer may already be replacing some of this, especially with young children who are growing up with computer usage at home and at school. However, computers may be used merely to replicate existing strategies: for example, the pop-quiz, the work-book approach, instead of being made an occasion for rethinking and remodeling learning to make it more appropriate, humane, and socially responsible. If we knew in a more substantial way what literacy meant, we might stand a better chance of representing it effectively through the new computer medium. As it is, most hypertext users and theorists (despite many confident pronouncements) are really blundering in the dark.

As Kaplan goes on to suggest, the evidence available for assessing hypertext is so far not encouraging. Despite the exuberant claims, hypertext writing that is genuinely innovatory rather than experimental, that makes creative use of its so-called "open" properties, largely seems lacking:

The compelling logic of hypertextual writing, however, has so far failed to produce many of these "open" texts -- some would argue that no genuine examples of the genre yet exist. Which is not to say that they never will, but only to acknowledge the powerful social forces arrayed against such a change.

This may be the case, but is it "social forces" that have prevented the change? Or is it an inherent limitation in the medium? For example, the Eastgate fictions I have seen are hardly "open" in any way that I would understand the term: readers are confined to following specific pathways provided by the author. The liberty of choosing between two or three different paths, or choosing a graphic link instead of a text, is a restricted kind of liberty. One might as well talk about a chess board as "open." Until all the chess pieces are granted the same liberty as the queen to move in any direction, and perhaps right off the board as well, the restriction of the chess player to a limited and prescribed set of moves is about as limited as the hypertext reader.

On the other hand, we might see the web as a kind of open hypertext system in potential. Although current technology doesn't yet support the immediate pasting in of links, commentaries, etc. online (as Landow's Intermedia made possible several years ago), I imagine this must be around the next corner. If so, then " the powerful social forces" out there that Kaplan is worried about have already lost whatever battle they were said to be fighting. I take it that the larger issue here is who is in control: if it is "open" then the reader is supposed to be in control rather than the author. At the moment the reader on the web is still restricted to the reception mode, but genuine interactivity is already available in off-web sites such as MUDs and MOOs, and these may herald revolutions in web technology itself. On the other hand, in another sense readers have always been in control, if we look at how readers relate to printed text. The myth of the linear reading enforced by print technology (cf. Bolter or Landow, among others), is highly misleading. The problem now is that the hypertext environment appears to formalize and externalize the freedom of the reader in relation to the text. But this may be an illusion: it may mean rather a freezing of the non-linear processes formerly at the discretion of the reader, thus a loss of readerly power. Such an illusion is the more seductive because it comes attended with the banners militant of a rhetoric of democratization. But just who is being deceived here?

Thus, while I sympathize, I am also sceptical of this comment of Kaplan's:

The World Wide Web's instantiation of hypertext comes closer to preserving the privileges and power relations of print than most of the other systems -- I'm thinking of commercially available software like HyperCard or Storyspace or Guide -- devised to facilitate the development of multiply branching, electronic texts.

This may be largely true at the moment, but the rapid dissemination of web access, tools, and web-space downstream beyond the present elites (like us, in our privileged university environment), means that the web will democratize its version of print culture rather soon. If Bill Gates and his colleagues have their way, interactive web-based computing may be as common as TV within five to ten years at current rates of progress. Videotron, the local TV cable service, already offers internet connection in Edmonton. Kaplan notes that the web has now moved well beyond the academic, and that "other interests will be deciding how equitably access is distributed." But all historical evidence from Henry Ford to Videotron suggests that when dollars are to be made the new tool will over time be made more cheaply and disseminated as widely as possible. The question then becomes how far the capitalist means of production retain control over the form of the tool and the uses to which it can be put, that is, whether we face a Disney-Microsoft web universe or whether the creativity of its users will prevent the homogenizing, corporate culture from taking over. Given what is already out there on the web, I'm on the side of optimism on this issue.

But Kaplan seems more pessimistic:

to put the matter another way, social, political, and economic elites try to shape the technologies we have so as to preserve, insofar as possible, their own social, political, and economic status. They try to suppress or seek to control those elements of electronic technologies uncongenial to that purpose. The degree to which they are successful in controlling the development and use of electronic texts will define the nature and the problems of literacy in the future.

This comes drearily close to the kind of conspiracy theory about corporate culture that we hear too often.

However, there is a real theoretical issue, as Kaplan notes:

all the tools, the techniques, and the social practices within which tools are devised, developed and deployed chart the contours of ideological spaces. . . . Beginning with the process of defining a "problem" or "opportunity" for which a given tool or conglomeration of tools can become first a solution and then the solution, the forms [that] a set of tools, techniques, and social practices may take are determined at least as much by the socio-economic milieu as they are by any "inherent" or essential properties of the tools themselves.

This sounds plausible. Ideology, if this is correct, is effective only if it is transparent, if it naturalizes the form and functions of the tools it selects out. Is this happening with the web? Or isn't it rather that issues such as hate groups, web pornography, on the one hand, and privacy issues on the other, have recently foregrounded various problematic aspects of this tool, so that it is far from "transparent"? Is it ever likely to become so? And who inhabits the "ideological spaces" chartered by the web? (chartered as in Blake's "London": are these mind-forged manacles I see?). Kaplan's ideological framework suggests a kind of conformity about the web community and what it is able to do, which seems to me quite contrary to the extraordinary flowering of the creative, the outrageous, and the merely trivial, that I see whenever I go surfing.

Kaplan also reflects on the instability of electronic texts, a familiar topic among hypertext theorists:

The term "Politexts" also refers to multiple variants of a text, the evolutions of texts as they circulate or even as I accumulate them on my hard drive as I revise. In this second sense of the word, other dangers lurk, as the designers of tools for collaborative work have discovered. Here too, the danger is a kind of proliferation, a multiplication through bifurcation. As many people contribute to a shared text base, there is always the chance that no one version contains a "one, true version." The fear here is pollution or debasement: how will we know good words from bad, authorized versions from corrupted ones?

I am using the term politexts, then, to indicate the radical (root) instability and promiscuity of inscriptions digitally encoded, stored, retrieved. That such profusion and plenty offers a threat to the discursive world we have known needs little argument or exposition: the very terms -- instability, promiscuity, corruption -- reveal our fears.

This seems to me another example of confusing the medium with the message, or ends with means. Our culture shows rather the reverse of this threat: we tend to fetishize cultural and material objects, preserving them in order to valorize them or circulate them unchanged, whether Madonna's bra or the latest Van Gogh painting that's just come up for auction. This is the commonplace version of what we also regularly do with literary texts, where scrupulous attention to the editing of canonical texts is now the norm. Why would electronic publication change this so drastically? Just because it is possible doesn't mean that it will happen. In fact, the seasoned user of web texts knows that there are several reliable sources of edited, proofread electronic versions of the major canonical literary texts, as well as less well known texts from various periods, especially by women writers, which are now being recuperated with a rapidity and accessibility that would have been impossible through the print medium.

There is another version of the fear of instability reported by Kaplan --

For Tuman, the logic, the stability, and the authority of the printed word guaranteed a culture (a high culture, really) characterized by "a serious, introspective, relentlessly psychological . . . hermeneutic tradition of interpretation" (p. 62) . Online literacy, by contrast, favors a kind of hit-and-run mentality: readers who will cruise the information highway looking for and seizing upon the least they need to know.

-- which also seems to be an unsupported interpolation from the supposed fluidity of the electronic medium. There is a time to cruise and a time to focus and meditate. Why would I let the medium dictate which choice to make?