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38sNOTES TO PAGES85-r 25dicated the presence of a replacement button; clicking the mouse button producedthe phrase "Revised Standard Version."5. Bolter, Writing Space,63-8L, provides an excellent survey of visual elementsin writing technologies from hieroglyphics to hypertext. The periodical Visible Language,whichhas appeared since 1966, contains discussions ofthis subject from awide variety of disciplines, ranging from the history of calligraphy and educationalpsychology to book design and human/computer interaction.6. In discussing Barthes's Elements of Semiology, Lavers exemplifies the usualattitucle toward nonaiphanumeric information when she writes that Barthes'snotion of narrative "acknowledges the fact that literature is not only 'made of words'but also ofrepresentational elements, although the latter can ofcourse only be conveyedin words" (134). That pregnant "of course" exposes conventional assumptionsabout texhrality.7. Geert Lovink caustically complains: "Interaction design seems to have lost itsbattle against interface stupidity. The office metaphor of the previous decade has beenexchanged for an adaptation of the newspaper front page out]ook as the dominantinformation architecture" ("Cyberculture in the Dotcom Age," in Dark Fiber,334\8. These pieces greatly resemble the student projects in Macromedia Directorcarried out at the Rhode School of Design in the mid-1980s in digital typographycourses conducted by KrystoffLenk and Paul Kahn. These proiects, which I have discussedelsewhere, take the form of animating the texts of poems by Berthold Brechtand Mary Oliver, so that lines move across the screen, appear and disappear' in waysthat perform the poem. Occasionally, sound was added to the text as well.9. One of the most important pioneering discussions of the importance of fixityin print culture is Mcluhan's Gutenberg Galary. See also Eisenstein, PrintingPress; andBolrer, Witing Space.10. These paragraphs are directly inspired by Noah Wardop-Fruin's eloquent talkat Brown University's Efost (ApriI 2004), reminding us that Nelsons stretchtextdemonstrates he does not limit hypertext to that created by links.Chapter 4. Reconfiguring the Author1. For a discussion of to what degree hypermedia in both read-only and readwriteforms does or does not empower readers, see chapter 8.2. Marie-Laure Ryan makes some properly forcefirl obsewations about extremeclaims that hlpertext makes readers into writers: "To the skeptical observer, the accessionof the reader to the role of writer . . . is a self-serving metaphor that presentshypertext as a magic elixir: 'Read me, and you will receive the gift of literary creativity.'If taken literally-butwho really does so?-the idea would reduce writing tosummoning words to the screen though an activity as one, two, three, click . . . Callthis writing if you wish; but if working one's way through the maze of an interactivetext is suddenly called writing, we will need a new word for relrieving words fromone's mind to encode meanings" (9). The context of this astute warning makes clearthat Ryan mistakenly includes me among critics who believe in the complete mergingof reader and writer. As the complete sentence she quotes makes clear, thephrase she emphasizes with italics-" of ourselves as authors"-refers to the way