The last time I heard Joyce speak, he told us, in a long and densley textured presentation, that "Netscape is television."  He went one to mourn the rapid commercialization of the web, the outpacing of educational sites by commercial sites, the sudden appearance of the now familiar banner ads.

I am still wrestling with Joyce's use of "exploratory" vs. "constructive" hypertexts.  I think the distinction has more to do with the capabilities of the authoring software at the time the piece was written than the product itself.  Guide and hypercard produced "exploratory hypertexts."   StorySpace produced "constructive hypertexts."  That distinction, at the time the text was written, was largely because of the type of hypertexts created with the various tools, not just the "capabilities" or features of the tools.   Guide, I think, was largely used by coporate America to create exploratory hypertext. The "test" hypertext for StorySpace, a fictional narrative and constructive hypertext, was afternoon. (blue comment added 9-23-98)

I love the following passage from Joyce's introduction.   (Emphasis and colors mine.)

Previously stable horizons across my psychic landscape gave way to dizzying patterns of successive contours, each of which was most assuredly real, each of which did not last. Because previous landmarks would not stand still, I have had to learn to measure my progress differently, becoming in the process an example of my mother's distinctive version of the cyborg: "Those dizzy bastards who claim that just because they're spinning the world has changed."

Spinning, the world does change. "Bound in a spiral dance," in Haraway's phrase, we are left dizzied and wondering how to use what we know in order to make our way. So shaken, we suddenly are able "to see," as Don Byrd characterizes the vision of the poet Charles Olson, "that the content of the world has uses inside the skin." A pirouetting dancer "spots" a point in space to avoid dizziness; a pilot uses a horizon indicator to turn a barrel roll. Yet it is the body that not only knows the change but literally makes the way.

This is to say that change is the only true destination, the only reliable occupation in a world that, as Haraway says, "make[s] problematic the statuses of man or women, human, artifact, member of race, individual identity, or body." Olson uses the word proprioception to account for the uses of the content of the world inside the skin. Proprioception is the body's knowledge of its own depth and location, its internalized perspective of "how to use oneself and on what," in Olson's phrase. Yet graphical computer interfaces, hypertexts, virtual realities, and other instances of what Haraway calls the "couplings between organism and machine conceived as coded devices" serve to externalize the internal. Such varieties of technological experience insist upon the permeability of the "self" and the "what" and the uses made of each. Cyborg consciousness invites us to turn proprioception outward beyond Haraway's "crucial boundary breakdown" of organism-machine to a place where we take "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and responsibility in their construction."

"As we form it, we are being formed."

Carolyn Guyer