The Space Between

Bridging the Digital Divide

Contemporary thinking, made possible by literary theorists, depicts the relationship between authors and readers in print as an unbalanced one where authors hold a majority of the power to decide a text’s meaning. But hypertext and other electronic writing technologies have made it possible for readers and authors to share more of the creative power and for each role to take on some aspects of the other, producing what Barthes called writerly texts. The reader’s experience with a hypertext can now include partially authoring it. This is a drastic increase in power for the reader, and it is in increase that critics like Landow and Nelson predicted would democratize reading and writing.

Yet the Web did not mature democratically. The aging saying--familiar to most research librarians—says that “anyone can put up a Web site,” but this required more than a little technical prowess. Instead of the easy-to-use system that Nelson envisioned when he created Project Xanadu, publishing a Web site required the technical capacity to find a Web host and code the pages in HTML. Though these services and skills have become easier to find and master over time, a divide still remains between the digital “haves” and “have-nots.”

Publishing a Web site does not mean that everyone will view it or want to view it. To a degree, the democratization Landow and Nelson expected did happen, but that new freedom became meaningless in the face of sheer numbers. Millions of sites were created during the Internet boom in the mid-1990s, and of those, only a few could afford to advertise and promote themselves. The rest continued to exist online, unread or barely read. The situation is similar to what happens to privately published books in the world of large-scale publishing houses and worldwide distributors. What good, one might ask, are the democratizing characteristics of electronic text when the same capitalistic biases of the print world are just as present online?