First of all, there's the desk. Preferably it's wide and deep, with plenty of room to spread papers, books, and pens on it but also space for a computer to one side. There are a few pencils, but more likely plenty of pens--I prefer mine slender and heavy, in black, blue, red, and green inks (black and blue for early drafts, red for revision, green for comments if used at all). I try to have a window nearby--I suppose it's easier to stare into space if there's some distance to look into rather than a wall three feet away. If there's enough room--there is where I live now--the desk is in a separate room that serves as an office; when I've lived in smaller places it's simply in an alcove or corner.
Briefly, this is the kind of work space I like to write in, and the kind I have where I now live. Despite the need for a newer computer--at home I use an early laptop my wife already owned when we married--it had basically been sufficient up until the last couple of years. But then, an interest in hypertext that had been stewing in my thoughts for a couple of years came to the fore with the growing popularity of the World Wide Web. Now, while I still retain all of the previous tools (and use all of them except old Royal office typewriter my late brother-in-law gave me when I went to college), I now have a vast new set. New PCs and Macs and Sun workstations, windows-based word-processors, Web browsers and HTML editors and graphics conversion programs and offline hypertext environments where I can construct complex webs of text visualized in small blocks on the screen connected by arrowed links and move the blocks around, link and unlink them with the flick of a button.
These shiny new tools are, well, anywhere but my home: they're spread all over campus (at Duke University) in clusters and offices and libraries. Sometimes they're in a quiet place but more often they're in a hubbub of typing and clicking and Web audio links and undergraduate white noise. I can, and will when my wife and I can fit it into our budget, purchase some of the hardware and software I need for this new work. But I don't kid myself--I will probably not be able to afford a computer at the cutting edge (which keeps moving away) but one just behind it. For the time being, though, during all the work I've done on my master's thesis and probably for some time to come, hypertext has done the same thing to my toolbox and workspace it has done to my fiction and is beginning to do to my nonfiction: explode it into fragments flying in all directions (one software, Storyspace, even has a submenu function called "explode"--guess what it's for). Hypertext--writing's Big Bang.
I realize, of course, that I'm quite lucky to have all this equipment available to me at all. It is only my connection to a university that makes it possible. I doubt, in fact, that without being connected to a campus that I would be interested in hypertext at all, maybe scarcely have heard of it. This leads me to a point that Richard Grusin makes in a review of several recent books about hypertext--including books I discuss here such as Bolter's Writing Space--the authors often tend to wax enthusiastic over the supposed "democratizing" effect of the electronic writing technologies while ignoring the issue of just who will have access to them. George Landow, for example, "fails to consider the economic consequences of his propositions--not only the costs of obtaining, maintaining, and upgrading hardware and software for faculty and students, but also the costs of keeping class sizes a reasonable level" (Grusin, 47). Grusin goes on to note that until education is regarded differently in America, new electronic technologies "will be installed not 'democratically," but by means of the same kind of trickle-down economics under which American education operated throughout the 1980s (Ibid, 49).
Grusin's point is well-taken. I began this discussion by pointing out that a desire to write with electronic technology greatly affected where I write. But it also works in the other direction: where I am greatly affects not only my access to electronic technology but my very awareness of its existence. Because I happen to work in a research library at a major university, I am able to go to school fairly cheaply as an employee. At the same time, my library employment gives me a lot of opportunities to try out new technologies and have the same or better access to them than faculty do. But this was not always so. I am very much part of a transitional generation. Socioeconomically I am part of the generation making the transition from print to electronic media. Personally, I am part of the generation in my family making the transition from blue collar to white collar work, from rural to urban living, and from elementary to post-secondary education. The world I come from is not the world of electronic writing technologies but one much closer to that of "Holier Than Thou." For most people in this country, much less those in poorer countries, the Web and the Internet are not much less remote to their daily existence than radio and automobiles are to the area into which Nelson Tucker's first wife, May, moves in the 1920s. They are something that has possibly been witnessed firsthand, but more often heard of than experienced. Standalone hypertext systems such as Storyspace are not even on the horizon. The criticism directed at the Web often takes the same tone as early criticism of television, that it is a vast wasteland, one that is swiftly being taken over by commercial interests. Yet to have any sort of a "democratizing" effect the networked world will have to reach a lot of people. If it is not subsidized by the government, it will take something like the snowballing popularity of the Web, pushed by commercial and governmental interests, to drive costs low enough to extend this new technology as broadly as the automobile and radio/television before it in this century.
Abstract | Future Directions | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance
Initial release: June 10, 1996
Last update: July 30, 1996