In "Fretwork: Reforming me," Carolyn Guyer invites her readers to consider electronic communication, particularly that taking place in MOOs (Multiuser-dimension Object Oriented), as illustrative of a larger question: can the notion of individual as author-of-text or, indeed, author-of-self endure in a hypertextual environment? Here, hypertext refers to the web of documents, images, sounds, and other "texts" in a system that may be accessed in any number of ways, from any number of paths, for any number of purposes. To consider the difference between text and hypertext, consider the difference investigated by Guyer, of author and collaboration. In the former (text/author), the self is central, inviolate, and in charge. In the latter (hypertext/collaboration), the self loses some nature of control previously enjoyed over the construction of text but gains, potentially, in the intersection of voices and perspectives enabled in the electronic environment.

Guyer spends some time discussing the process of artistic invention to illustrate her point, focusing for a time on the act of quilting. Here, she argues that the quilt attains value from its gathering of various perspectives even more than the "quality" of its construction. Elsewhere, Tyrone Adams and I participate in this narrative: "Quilts possess a communal potential by stitching together clusters of meaning beyond the individual contexts of the quilters" (Wood & Adams, 1998, p. 225). Potentially, the World Wide Web and various forms of electronic communication might best be understood as a quilt. However, this quilt is not fixed. It continually re-figures itself according to the perspectives of those who wrap themselves "inside." As a result, according to Guyer, "Boundaries are usually more permeable than we think. If we were to attempt to track how contexts continually reconfigure themselves, we would probably find that it is not possible to cross index enough" (p. 209). One might find a useful parallel between this claim and the explosion of web-pages that renders search engines suspect in their claims to index the web.

Weaving back and forth from electronic communication to various forms of artwork, Guyer proposes that we may understand our relationships - online and otherwise - as intracultural, rather than intercultural. She defines this notion as the belief that "the individual is the locus for his or her own personal culture" (p. 209). Like the web surfer, the individual exists as an intersection of various texts and faces an existential question: am I the author of this experience? This question mirrors a larger one that animates this class: Are we the authors of our own lives? Guyer suggests that this question emerges from a desire to maintain control through the invocation and construction of boundaries that are impermeable. She claims that electronic communication may offer an alternative model for identity construction that emphasizes less the immutable author and invites, instead, the collaborative self. There is risk, of course, in the electronic environment that we might employ these collaborative spaces to act anonymously in ways that could harm others, in manners we would never adopt in face to face interaction. However, this risk is mitigated by the potential for online identity to liberate the self from traditional inequities, to create alternative forms of society:

We are learning the effects of unexpected pastiche, of writing on the fly, of the cognitive and creative advantages made by densely multiple linking. This is not necessarily a pretty sight. But it surely has its moments. (Guyer, p. 216)

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