FoolsCap

Something Jeff wrote got me thinking. . .

In his post, Jeff describes a sort of pleasurable drift through the content on YouTube, comparing it to Benjamin’s <i>Arcades</i> or Barthes’ drift.  At one point, Jeff uses the phrase "fascinating Web" to describe his pleasure in such drifting. 

I find something engaging in this phrase.  With a slight tweak, "Web," capitalized and heralding the WWW, can become simply "web" and for me thus retains more metaphoric value.  The "fascinating web," then, as metaphor for writing: a place of connection and connectedness (if the two can be understood as unique).  I like the idea of web-as-writing for a number of reasons (I’ll know what the number is when I’m done writing):

1. Connections.  As I come to understand more how all writing is intertext, one thing that fascinates me is how ideas/words/practices are repeated through different levels of disourse.  Nothing new here, but I’m always geeked by this phenomenon anyway.
2. Connectedness.  To sound maybe a little too meta for a moment: The distinction between connection/connectedness, for my purposes, is this: connection is simply the fact of the connection, the raw data behind a link between two sites/cites, while connectedness is our awareness of and ability to exploit/manipulate/use that connection.
3. If we think too of what web is biologically, we can expand the metaphor even further.  Of course, one bio-web is that of the spider–a trap, a sticky lure.  Writing depends on that sticky lure, right?–the promise of pleasure and fascination is what hails us to those subjects we write about.  (And yes, I know that the spider’s web is also a sight of consumption and destruction, but I admit I haven’t really thought the metaphor all the way through.)
4. In biology, there’s also the idea of the food web, a model that supersedes the linear food-chain to emphasize the mutlivalent, expansive relationships between produces and consumers.  (Some of that language–producers and consumers–I note is echoed in some composition theory.  I’m looking at you, Trimbur.)  Our web–those of us who are rhet/comp scholars rather than biologists–is the textual web.  While certainly there’s a text-chain as well, the text-chain is just the linear strand that makes up one radius of the text-web
5. Of course, the WWW is part of this metaphor too–hypertext as conscious exploitation of the connections between sites and texts.

All of this as a serendipitous prelude into my next post. . .