The use of a hypertext environment for this project reflects in many ways my attitudes about movement.

In spite of my interest in the ways that movement is reflected in our "real world" interactions, I have found that movement can be a particularly difficult concept to capture in writing.

We often write narratives which reflect straightforward movements in time: "and then they lived happily ever after." And although we write more complicated narratives which move around in time -- attempting to show, for example, the perspectives of several different characters at the same time or one character moving backwards and forwards in time -- the need for stories that move in a particular direction can be difficult to resist.

The "hypertext as inherently multi-linear" stance that was common in many early writings on the form and structure of such texts (e.g. Jay David Bolter's Writing Spaces 1992) has been complicated in more recent work (Examples of work in this area would include Bolter & Grusin's, Remediation: Understanding New Media; Billie Wahlstrom & Chris Scruton's article, "Constructing Texts/Understanding Texts: Lessons from Antiquity and the Middle Ages,"; and Terry Harpold's article, "The Lingering Errantness of Place, or Library as Library"). However, I do feel that a digitally linked text allows me to use time and space in interesting ways. For example, it allows me to make paths which represent movement through time while at the same time creating paths which show how thinking processes occur through looping and reciprocity. Things happen and I think about them, and then later I connect them to other things. As I continually update my "knowledge database" pieces of information are always being "lost." Finally, what I "know" is what remains at any given moment, synthesized in some kind of representation -- as self-reflection, or in verbal or textual form. But what is saved, and therefore available, is not always what was important, or relevant at other moments in time. I believe in the usefulness of and am excited by the process of examining the flashes of connection which often do not survive in more traditional academic texts. I think hypertext allows me to make use of these connections in productive ways, perhaps even helping to create  types of consensus that maintain their flexibility in the face of conflicting contributions.

A second issue which relates to the hypertext form is the way that not only connections but gaps in thinking and reasoning can be illustrated in particular ways. So that in connecting the hibiscus in my front yard, the Columbine shooting, my college friendships, etc., I am also forced to recognize the elaborate process of meaning making that connects these things and registers them, to me at least, as logical. In this text I feel the artificiality of the gap in hyperspace -- the moment of transition when the screen changes from one to another -- creates a sense of disconnection, as does the lack of textual transition between ideas. Because a particular screen can be reached from multiple spaces, the reader (and the writer) is never sure if a particular train of thought was meant to connect or expand on another. For topics which are surrounded by the kind of conceptual walls individuals find difficult to breach, such gaps are a reflection of the lack of connection between, for example, what I say and how I relate my experience, and how another person responds to my stories with stories from alternate perspectives. The gap of moving from screen to screen might help to disrupt the smoothness of rhetorical transitions which seem to say, "of course this is connected and logical."

At some moments in writing I do wish to create this type of smoothness, but here it seems as if the most valuable thing I could do would be to open the space up to other voices.