What interests me most about both the Bolter and the Hawisher et al. examinations of computers and computer-mediated writing is the predictions that the writers make about how computers will change society and writing. Both books want to predict rapid social changes and slow technological advances… but the way things played out, and are continuing to play out, it’s the technology that keeps advancing at lightspeed, and the social changes are lagging behind. Bolter suggests that no one is going to read a computer in bed, but that computers and digital technology will cause us to rethink and reexamine our culturally-held notions of what it means to read and write. Well, I can not only read my computer in bed, I can read novels from my computer screen wherever I want… but many of the textual conventions of printed text remain static on the computer screen. Texts are still written, and read, in linear form, and as readers of hypertext, we resist the “wall of text” and ask for smaller “pages” of text. Students who are referred to hypertexts often only read the page that is in front of them, and don’t click the links to explore (much like they don’t read the footnotes or endnotes on a piece of print). So I wonder, really, whether digital technology is going to outstrip the process of remediation.

(There’s some thought here about web and web 2.0 remediating web 1.0 processes, but I haven’t quite managed to sort it out in my own head yet.)