THE WEB ESSAY: EXPLORING ARGUMENTS

FIELD OF DREAMS

In "Rhetorical Paths and Cyber-Fields: ENFI, Hypertext, and Bakhtin," Trent Batson pictures linear academic writing in the print media as a "path" and contrasts it to the "field" created in electronic hypertexts:

Text on paper is usually 'linear,' although we've developed conventions to break out of this mold, such as footnotes, marginalia, boxes, and others. Some magazines seem to be striving hard to become as 'hypertextual' as possible. But, even given these efforts to break out of the confines of paper and print, academic writing has tended to be linear because it generally follows certain set discourse patterns, sustaining an 'appropriate' register (as I am doing in this chapter), and imposing a logical order so that the succession of ideas is congruent. Let's think of this as a path through a field. But what if the text is not viewed as a path but instead as a field? What if your experience as a reader is wandering around the field, seeing the field from may different perspectives, going in circles instead of a line? What if you are not led through the landscape but just <let loose in it? What if a conversation or a discussion is not a line but a field, where you seem to move recursively among conversational threads? (12-13)


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