Forgot to write this part: If we need a rice bowl to protect, it ought to be RHETORIC, which is the whole point behind writing from its very inception millennia ago.

This plays right into my existing and continuing research, and I’ve cited Bolter all over the place.

1) The literary movement didn’t /need/ to beat back the hypertext movement. The hypertext movement hasn’t captured much audience because a) no one knows it exists; and b) when someone does encounter it, the hypertexts themselves are so scattered that they violate all expectations of narrative; and c) it costs too darn much to get the software to view some of the more famous hypertexts; and d) hypertexts share with other PoMo writing experiments an utter contempt for audience. In short, no one has to “beat back” something that no one knows about and that sucks for those few who’ve heard of it.

All of which is just me whining and bitching about the ivory towerness of hypertext literature in the same way I do about PoMo lit at nearly every opportunity. If narrative isn’t for the reader/hearer/viewer, it’s a pointless and tragic waste of creative energy.

2) I agree with your question at the head of the post: why does this matter? I feel the same way about all the VR stuff from the nineties that I’ve read. On the one hand, the more we achieve telepresence and 24/7 sensory connectivity, the less use the average person will have for writing to communicate in their everyday lives. But business, government, and academe aren’t going to stop insisting on written traces, and they’re the ones for whom 99% of writing gets done /now/.

I think what’s hanging up Bolter and a lot of others is the idea of WRITING as something more than a communicative technology. It’s as if we must protect WRITING as some sacred space of which we are high priest(esse)s. With all due respect, bull@^*%.

The really tragic thing about a lot of the VR/AR speculation and theorization is that it misses one niggling little point that I may just have to write a paper on: /humans don’t need sensory immersion to experience affective immersion/!! We have had “VR” since the first MUDs and MOOs. Maybe since the telephone. When humans become engaged in a communicative environment, /that is the reality they’re experiencing/.