There is little question that computers and networking technologies have changed the way the world works. Without delving back into the economics of access and the digital divide, I will say that the Web has altered how many people around the world live their lives—despite the theories of critics like Theodore Roszak who attempt to deconstruct our “need” for computers and the Internet. Not only has it profoundly impacted everyday life, but hypertext has also given literary theorists new ways to look at the media and institutions we once took for granted.

All of the arts, Northrop Frye argues in The Educated Imagination, are based on simple divisions. In his book, he imagines a person stranded on a deserted island. That person makes simple distinctions, Frye says, between himself and the world around him. As time goes on, the castaway makes further distinctions between himself, the natural world, and things that might be useful to his budding society. The castaway forges his closest relationship with those things he can use, but he never forgets the natural world that once threatened his existence. Art, Frye writes, is an attempt to bridge that gap, to once again become part of the world that he came from. All the myths and stories common to a society are derived from this initial separation.

Writing too is based on separation, the separation from the person and the creative power of the author. The nature of that relationship is defined in this case by the medium through which the relationship is conducted: writing. Writing perpetuates the separation by transmitting language over distance and time. The author does not have to be present for her words to be read and understood. The silent page of printed or written text has replaced the intimacy of listening to a pre-literate bard or storyteller.

The benefit of writing—after its mechanization—was, of course, reproducibility. A printed text can be disseminated for more efficiently than an oration. Writing also leaves a record, upon which scholars of later eras can build their own ideas. In that way, writing provided the scaffolding for modern scholarship, even for the modern definition of humanity if you believe Harold Bloom’s ideas about Shakespeare. Yet that authorial distance, a boon for so many years, slowly became a detriment to underprivileged voices that could not afford to put their words into print. The space that served scholarship and science, and through them the rest of humanity, for centuries began to divide the author and reader even further as economics and politics began to play a larger role in worldwide practices of reading and writing.

An overabundance of similar voices in print combined with advances in political thinking in the 1800s and 1900s to create resistance. In literature, which we are primarily concerned with here, that resistance surfaced in literary theory—a self-aware rereading of the texts that brought them into question. This came to a head around the middle twentieth century with the rise of poststructuralism and then deconstruction. Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and others started to question the author/reader hierarchy. The space between the author and reader was reconceived as a social construction, a product of the Romantic Period. Those critics saw that the space between them was false; writers were just readers in disguise, and readers could be writers with the right access.

That access is at stake here. Hypertext and hypermedia technologies, pioneered in the 1960s and popularized in the 1990s, provided the tools for readers to take an active role in the creation of the textual world. The software and hardware advances that have come either to create hypertext or to serve hypertext have given average people the chance to publish their writing to an immense audience; and unlike print, which sets its words as if in stone, hypertext and hypermedia allow for free play (the heart of Derrida’s view of deconstruction). Unlike the line-for-line and word-for-word reproduction print offers, hypermedia allows its users to more easily create derivative works, sometimes to such a degree that the original work is lost, decontextualized out of existence.

The practical result is that more voices are heard/read by more people, which ideally creates a more democratic world—though economics still plays a factor in access. The theoretical implications are that hypertext and hypermedia, employed with networking technologies, especially via modern Web 2.0, applications, have closed the author/reader gap.

What comes next? That’s the biggest question of all. One example might be the novel writing project that Penguin Publishing and De Montfort University embarked on in early 2007. The project is called “A Million Penguins.” The designers are hoping to find out whether the venerable novel can survive the “crowdsourcing” phenomenon that has made Wikipedia such a success. Any visitor to the novel’s site can edit or rewrite a part of the novel, having agreed to follow Penguin’s rules of etiquette of course. The question is whether “small pieces loosely joined” can result in a complete, coherent novel with a believable narrative voice and, most importantly, a lack of ego from its authors. The site’s information page says, “We are used to the romantic notion of the artist or the novelist working alone in an attic room, or in the shed at the bottom of the garden. As James Joyce memorably put it, the artist forges in the ‘smithy of [his] soul’” (“About”). Will “A Million Penguins” reveal a new form of the novel?

Will you help reveal it?

Lethem looks at the same issues prevalent in the Molotov Man as they apply to writing. He criticizes the state of American copyrights, calling them bloated in “both scope and duration,” restrictions that he says technology shows to be “bizarre and arbitrary” (63). Copies, he writes, were once easy to locate and count; but as in the case of Garnet and Meiselas, technology has made “copies” so common we don’t even think about them unless we feel wronged in some way by them. Usually those wronged are the authors, who do see art and culture as a commons, which Lethem argues they are. Creations, like Molotov Man, easily cross into common usage and become a part of the transmission medium itself. Those creations left alone, counted as the “price of a rare success” (68). If an author or artist believes that she will receive perfect recompense for her work, she is deluded. Lethem goes on:

The dream of a perfect systematic remuneration is nonsense. I pay rent with the price my words bring when published in glossy magazines and at the same moment offer them for almost nothing to impoverished literary quartiles, or speak them for free into the air in a radio interview. So what are they worth? (68)

For Lethem, thoughtful reading is a violation of the sanctity of the text, an “impertinent raid on the literary preserve.” Like the ill-fated scientists in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, authors cannot hope to control the interaction between readers’ imaginations and the words set free in that literary preserve (64):

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them. (68)

The story of the Molotov Man image began in Nicaragua in 1979 when Sue Meiselas photographed a Sandinista fighter throwing a burning Pepsi bottle. Less than a year later, reproductions of that photograph began appearing on things like matchbox covers and posters. For 20 years, the Molotov Man image spread around Nicaragua as the symbol for the revolution until Garnet “found” the image in 2003 and turned it into a painting (57). Not long after she began showing the painting, Garnet received a letter from Meiselas’ lawyer asking that Garnet seek permission every time she wanted to reproduce the painting.

Fearing a possible lawsuit, Garnet removed a digital copy of the Molotov Man painting from her Web site, but it was already too late. Web users had already appropriated the image. Reproductions and derivative works circulated freely around the Web.

Neither of the women foresaw that outcome. It was a surprise to Garnet, but it was something of an insult to Meiselas’ ideals. She writes that, for her, the issue was not so much one of copyright but one of context. She sees her role as a photographer to be the opposite of Garnet’s role as painter. Where Garnet seeks to decontextualize an image, Meiselas contextualizes it (56). Meiselas understands all too well the ease with which an image or a text can be decontextualized in the Internet age, but she takes a stand. She says “if history is working against the context, then we must, as artists, work all the harder to reclaim the context. We owe this debt of specificity not just to one another but to our subjects, with whom we have an implicit contract” (58).

But Meiselas does not address who owns the rights to that image. Does she, the original photographer, own it? If she does have a valid claim to that image, what exactly does she lay claim to? All derivative works? Since Garnet created a new image from her photograph, is that new image necessarily related to the original? The question goes double for those derivative works created in the digital realm and posted via hypertext to the Web, where those secondary and tertiary artists may have no idea where their starting image came from. When the medium crosses from the tangible to the intangible, does an artist’s claim become any less valid? The same questions can be asked about other forms of art, like literature and music. When does imitation cross the line into intellectual trespassing?

In this relationship, the roles are changed. We are no longer talking about authors and readers; we refer to consumers and producers. And while traditional thinking may hold that demand drives producers, thanks to context-driven advertising consumers are now at the whim of the Web’s major advertisers—a situation that Eric J. Sinrod says parallels legal issues in the physical world.

Sinrod writes that digital intrusions are closely analogous to trespassing to chattels, the violation or taking of a person’s property. The most glaring example is, of course, unsolicited e-mail (spam). These uninvited messages arrive in the inboxes of Internet users around the world at an astonishing rate. A study conducted in late 2005 by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group determined that 80 percent of e-mail sent in the world is unsolicited. Along with spam, the trespassing analogy has also been applied in court cases to unwanted cell phone text messages and even to the distribution of spyware, software that maliciously opens the user’s computer to security risks.

The idea behind the trespassing argument, Sinrod says, is that the Web is a network of private stores or sites, a view supported by some courts. The common belief is that the actual server machines on which those sites are stored are private property. The owners allow “visitors” to partially access to their property, the public Web site—a gateway often abused by human and robotic burglars. Other courts, though, have adopted an even more physical view. If a “visitor” does not cause real damage to the victim’s computer equipment, there was no trespass or burglary.

The important thing here is not to focus so much on the legal issues and the economic issues but to see how ingrained spatial thinking has become in the digital world. Not only is it present in the names we have given to hypertext’s most basic features but it is also present in the way we think about cyberspace.

“The Web 2.0 dream is Socrates’s nightmare,” writes Andrew Keen, “technology that arms every citizen with the means to be an opinionated artist or writer.” A strong critic of user-created content, Keen says that the move towards a wreaderly Web “worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer.” He relies on comparisons to Plato’s infamous banning of poets from his Republic and on comparisons to Marxist communism to make a simple point: when people are allowed to do whatever they like, when a society permits them the leeway to do anything, the result is a community lacking in cultural depth and sophistication (Keen).

Keen’s chief argument, upon which he will elaborate in his forthcoming book The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, is that the traditional trappings of culture—film, literature, art, and music—will cease to reflect the world around us and begin to be highly personalized. Keen sees it happening already. Social networking sites like MySpace encourage social interaction, but the user chiefly interacts with his own page. Bloggers spend the most time organizing their own page instead of reading others’ blogs. Shoppers on Amazon.com have personalized selections presented to them, tailored to fit their habits. Search engines are even beginning to get in on the act, learning from a user’s past searches to provide “more relevant” results (and advertsing).

Examples abound, and Keen determines from them that Web users will see less and less of the world as others see it. He believes this will lead to a flatter cultural landscape and, ultimately, even more space between people and a more fractured world. His argument echoes in part what Walter Benjamin writes in his classic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin says that works of art have always been reproducible, but that mechanization added something new to the mix. The work of art is removed from the presence of the viewer in both “time and space” (1107). Moreover, mechanical reproduction removes art from ritual: “To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproduction” (1110). Benjamin and Keen both argue that this is a reversal of art’s function. For Benjamin, art becomes political. For Keen, art becomes common, vulgar. In both cases, technology removes the mystery and magic from art.

But deconstruction, as I’ve loosely defined it here, makes perfect sense in the context of a hypertext network. The connections between documents and words, lexias and ideas are fleeting. They are all consciously constructed pathways designed by an author or even, thanks to Web 2.0, a wreader; but there is also an element of the unknown. Just as a deconstructionist reading of any text has the potential to produce an unforeseeable outcome, following a link on the Web can produce an unpredictable reading experience, especially if the hypertext is vague about where that link will lead the reader. It may lead to a dead end or to a random page. Two of the highest profile uses of the random link is on the search engine Google’s home page with its “I’m Feeling Lucky” button and on the home page of the Wikipedia, where a single click takes users to a random page from the gigantic encyclopedia.

In fact, one of the most interesting features of hyperlink creation has been around since the early days of the Web: the random hyperlink. It used to be seen when such things as “Web rings” were popular. The creators of these groups of thematically-similar sites would put a navigation menu on their pages offering to take the user to the “next” site in the ring or to a random one. The increase in database-driven Web sites has only fueled the potential for random linking and for context-dependent links, even though the Web ring has gone out of fashion. A reader’s position in the hypertextual environment, her context, can now determine what choices she has for continuing her reading path.

Loss Pequeño Glazier writes, “Links bring to the text the riddle of discovery experienced by the anthropologist stepping onto the soil of a previously undiscovered culture … Once a link has been taken, it is no longer a link but a constituted part of the already traveled narrative; the link loses its potentiality but, in doing so, opens up the possibility of other links. And what if some of those links fail? What we have is not a failure of the internal system but a triumph of internal workings over any possibility of external order” (3). Links, he writes, are “faults in the monolinear imagination,” and it is this failure that truly distances hypertext from print (Glazier 3). Links can be as limited as the page designer’s imagination or as infinite as a computer’s uncanny ability to generate a random number.

As I mentioned in the introduction, tempering and vandalism have been the bane the Wikipedia since its immense rise in popularity. If the popular record is so malleable, many wonder, how can any of it be considered accurate? How can an anonymous mass of readers create a text as accurate as the world-famous Encyclopedia Britannica? As Johndan Johnson-Eiola and Amy Kimme Hea write:

What happens if history is erased or conversely if history is made too convenient? Is every history equally viable? Do all histories have equally loud voices? If every text and every view is equally available at all times, critical distance collapses and we are left without a way of reflecting critically on our present; we cannot locate the rupture, and any efforts to discuss the relationships among different hypertexts leaves everyone waiting in an absurdist play for a fictional character who is never to arrive. We require a non-accommodating hypertext, one that allows us a place into which we can push back. (418)

When every reader has a voice, it becomes increasingly difficult to hear one voice among the din. The non-accomodating hypertext that Johnson-Eiola and Kimme Hea propose would be one that provides rules and regulations, a firm hypertext in the spirit of Nelson’s Project Xanadu. Such systems are in the works, even by Nelson himself, with the goal of assigning credit (or blame) in a more print-traditional manner. DiLoria and Vitali look to return the Web to its globally-writable roots with their software IsaWiki, which promises safe and controlled page editing. They assert that “customization and reuse of other peoples’ materials can be the right moves towards and augmented web publishing environment, if and only if they are performed in a controlled and safe way, i.e., with good support for individual merits and authorship” (Di Lorio and Vitali 2) Their system essentially mirrors in code what the Wikipedia has recently adopted as policy. On Wikipedia, all those who wish to change a page must now register for a user account with the site. There is no way to certify an editor’s identity, but the thin veil of even a username is sometimes enough to provoke honesty and integrity on the Web.

But despite an apparent need for attribution—as per the Wikipedia scandals—typical Web users value anonymity over attribution, seeing open publishing without citation as the defining characteristic of the Web and of hypertext in general, which, as Johnson-Eiola and Kimme Hea write, “coalesces, it seems, around a wish of what we want text to be—contingent, anchored, slipping, caught in a net, Disappearing” (416).

Ultimate reader freedom on the Web may not be possible, considering the Web’s status as mediated hypertext. An observation make by Michalak and Coney is especially important to this theme: “a reader who attempted to play the role of user would be thoroughly frustrated by a document in which the designer had anticipated them to play maker of meaning” (180). In other words, the role a reader/user can expect to play is uncertain at best; and in a highly decentralized hypertext there is little in the way of context or semantic linkage to let the reader know her place with respect to the text or to indicate which roles she should play. Michalak and Coney imagine a system in which the reader could chose the role she wanted to play from the start. Only by understanding the relationship between author and reader from the start can a hypertext reader complete the chain of signification and accomplish hypertext’s primary purpose: communication (Michalak and Coney 181).

The Semantic Web will affect how users, those ubiquitous “readers” of the Web, interact with the online world, giving them far more control over their reading experience and even endow them with some of the powers of textual organization traditionally given to authors. One of the biggest improvements will come in the world of search engines. Modern search engines compare hypertexts based on the words present in them, notably just the text and not multimedia elements like photographs or videos. Ideally, the more words the two hypertexts have in common, the more the documents themselves will have in common (Green), but this sort of comparison does not account for incidences of polysemy and synonomy. Polysemy is a single word that has several meanings, and synonomy denotes two words with similar meanings. Basically these are the sort of things educated readers would catch through contextual knowledge of their respective languages, but it is the kind of thing non-intelligent computers have an extremely hard time doing. Both of these phenomena “disrupt the simple identity relationship” that information retrieval programs use to determine document likeness (Green 1).

The designers of the Semantic Web hope to build “lexical chains” of words that have similar meanings in the context of the document. For example: vim, vigor, zip, élan, pep, and vitality might be classified by semantic software as synonyms for life. With this lexical chain, a search engine could find documents that are more closely related to one another. Green describes the task of building semantic links between documents as “trying to discover the inter-textual cohesive relations” (3). Hence the entire lexical chains belonging to the documents will be similar rather than just one or two similar words. The hope is that the meanings of the two hypertext pages will be similar too.

This works thanks to tags that computer networks can read (and search) which describe the content of pages or images or videos. For semantics to classify and organize the entire Web, a huge number of tags will need to be written, and the most readily available source of labor is readers. Though this sounds like a lot of work and responsibility, it is already happening on sites like YouTube, Technorati, and Del.icio.us. YouTube users classify their streaming videos by entering keywords when they are uploaded. The same is true for blog content on Technorati and shared Web bookmarks on Del.icio.us. In all cases, the method for implementing the Semantic Web is not to release it officially like HTML, which you may remember is governed through a central lawmaking body, but to allow popular Web sites to build up databases of tags slowly. As readers read, comment, and upload content to Web 2.0, they are also helping to organize that giant Technicolor Dreamcoat of a hypertext system.

Doubtless, people will disagree over appropriate classifications, and there is also the danger that lexical chains of tags could be arbitrarily created by simply linking a hypertext to an online thesaurus. That would provide an efficient source of synonyms but a source lacking in the depth an empowered reader could bring to the hypertext. Could, for example a lexical chain created by software explain the word pharmakos as Derrida uses it in Disseminations? Automated procedures might provide some context, but it is doubtful the Semantic Web’s computer elements could make the same sort of links human readers can.

Outside of commercial uses, dynamic Web pages are growing increasingly popular for other activities, like reading the news. Google, the Web search giant, offers users its news site, Google News. Visitors to the site decide what news will be shown and in what order it will appear on the page. If a user is interested in technology news and not health news, for example, she only needs to click on the “Personalize this page” link. From there the user moves to a “drag and drop” menu that allows them to decide what in what order news items will be displayed, which type of news will appear, how many stories per category, and even whether or not they want she wants to create a “custom” news category. The custom category uses a set of filters that search the Web for news that fit the terms the user decides, an increasingly common practice on Web sites.

There is a distinction to be made between the ways dynamic text is generated for a Web site. Amazon.com’s method illustrates one way, tracking a user’s movements across the Web site to identify patterns and predict likely future behavior. Google News uses a different way: custom filters that display only the content a user wishes to see. Both create dynamic pages but in vastly different ways. The Amazon.com approach is more invasive and is a somewhat touchy subject for privacy advocates; it is also the reason for Amazon.com’s explicit privacy policy. Conversely, the filter method is passive. The user sets her criteria and waits for the appropriate content to find its way through the net. There is less invasion of privacy but more mediation, because while the user can set the filters, she is likely not privy to the inner workings of the software behind the results.

On a Web where millions find information through search engines, those sites’ theoretical and practical impartiality is a hot-button topic. The Washington Post reported in April 2007 that Google posted a sixty percent increase in profits for 2006 and according to the New York Times, the company was valued at $185 billion. Internet search is big business, even spawning subsidiary industries that promise to put their clients’ listing higher in the search engine results, where they will be more visible to consumers.

A study released in 2000 by Steven Lawrence and C. Lee Giles reported that search engines are “indexing a biased sample of the Web,” and that new technologies are “further biasing the accessibility of information on Web.” The search engines rank pages by the number of other Web pages that link to them. Consider for example two hypothetical Web pages that both deal with the French Revolution. One of the pages has 25 links pointing to it, the other 250,000 links. The 250,000-link page will be placed higher in a search engine’s ranking, possibly on the first page of results. The 25-link page will likely show up much further down, and the lower it is ranked, the less likely it is that Web users will find it and read it. If no one finds it and reads it, no one will link to it. The situation snowballs, making it difficult for small-scale Web authors to get their pages read. As Giles and Lawrence write, “This may delay or even prevent the widespread visibility of high-quality information.” Despite the increasing ease of publishing, it is still hard for the ordinary Web user to get his writing read.

On the other hand, statistics point out a different kind of democratization on the Web. Those looking for documents on the Web are having an easier time finding them, according to Deborah Fallows of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In January 2005, Fallows wrote that “users are extremely positive about search engines and the experience they have searching the Internet.” Readers are finding usable results when they search the Web, and Fallows says filtered search results add to that experience. But Fallows also says it is a reader-beware environment, as many users are unable to tell the difference between sponsored search results—the listings companies have paid for as advertising which often appear above or within other search results—and genuine results. When this sort of counterfeit site or link is used maliciously, it is known as “phishing” and can open the door for identity theft.