This subject aims to critically examine current and recent theory relating to networked writing. Does the embodiment of networked writing in the form of stand alone hypertext applications or in the form of the World Wide Web change our relationship as readers and writers to the written word?  Does networked writing, as Mark Poster argues, represent a third stage in the mode of information in which “the self is decentred, dispersed, and multiplied in continuous instability?”

Alongside these questions, students will be introduced to the basics of HTML and other networked writing applications and asked to consider the experience of writing in an online, electronic environment (namely, the WWW). We will ask what rules (if any) govern this new writing space and the extent to which a rhetoric of networked writing been developed? Students will be encouraged to rethink the concept of writing and to ask themselves such elusive questions as, what is a medium?