Long Blog
Today, I finished my chapter on digital writing for Jackie and Elaine’s new book. The central claims are not new - texts are changing. In it I put that the following trends are clear:

• A move from the fixed to the fluid: the text is no longer contained between the covers or by the limits of the page;
• Texts are revised, updated, added to and appended (and often archived);
• Genres borrow freely, hybridize and mutate;
• Texts become collaborative and multivocal with replies, links, posted comments and borrowing;
• Reading and writing paths are non-linear/ epistemology is rhyzomic;
• Hyperlinks allow readers and writers to construct layered meanings with new forms of intertextuality
• Multimedia allows for a rich interplay of modes - texts become multimodal

These texts are inter-related to changing contexts in which:

• A sense of space is shared as the local becomes global;
• The time is now as we inhabit a world of co-presence and synchronicity;
• Boundaries between work and leisure begin to blur;
• Distinctions between the public and the private are less clear;
• The concepts of rhetoric, scholarship and research are re-defined;
• The serious and the frivolous intermingle.

And, of course, there’s more…but I’ve moved on now to thinking more about digital writing and scholarship. I like what I’ve read about the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University. There’s Simon Shum’s work on hyperdiscourse and also, I note with interest, some work on blogging and distributed knowledge. Meanwhile I love this mapping stuff you can do with Flickr – thanks to Trois Tetes for the link.