Where Are the Electronic Grassroots?

Deena Larsen
Boulder, Colorado
Email: deenalarsen@yahoo.com Web site: http://www.deenalarsen.net
Key features: Author Details

All the nodes in this issue:

Editorial
Bibliography of Hypertext Criticism

Mez Breeze

Julianne Chatelain Richard E. Higgason Deena Larsen Bill Marsh Adrian Miles Jenny Weight

You can't go down to the corner library or the local writing association and join a hypertext writing group. You can't go into your local bookstore and join the hypertext-of-the-month club. Where then, outside of a few universities, can you turn for the grassroots of hypertext/new media/electronic writing? Where will our mainstream audiences come from? How will mainstream media be aware of or in touch with hypertexts/electronic literature/new media writing?

Slowly, we are gathering. We are forming groups from informal critique and discussion groups like Webartery to online hypertext writing and reading classes at trAce, SUNY, and other places. We are holding conferences and writing workshops from the Hypertext conferences to CyberMountain to Incubation to the ELO symposium. We have bulletin boards, discussion lists, and regular chats on various aspects of hypertext and new media literature. This is a wonderful start for a new art form that is only a decade or so old and changing rapidly.

But it is not enough. To develop the levels of criticism, reading and writing that linear writing enjoys, we will need to develop similar numbers of readers and writers. Hypertext writing and criticism will ultimately come from--and rely on--communities of writers and readers who share insights and strengthen works.

To grow these communities, we need to reach out to audiences both within the university and beyond the university walls. The question really is, who is our potential audience? And how can we reach them?