Writing ourselves into existence

One Pot Meal used the line that we are "writing ourselves into existence." He meant as a community, but I feel very strongly that as a person I am writing myself into existence as well. And I want to be seen, though at the same time I am doing it for myself, not for someone else's approval.

Steve goes on in his next post to write about new ways of writing on the web. I get so frustrated with asking students to write web pages because no matter how much I talk about how the web allows other kinds of organization all I get are illustrated papers. It is incredibly hard to break my students (freshman engineers from southern public schools) out of organizing things linearly. Back when Apple invented the idea of hypertext, before the Web came along, I remember there was some discussion of this as a new way of writing. Anyone remember whether any of it was useful?

I'm too tired to think about it further. I'm still struggling with painful memories from childhood. The tree was lifted off our house Tuesday by a 60 ton crane and an entire new roof put on yesterday. My new office is stacked with 33 boxes of books, I've unpacked maybe 5 and sent another 5 boxes of bound journals to the seminar room. One of my main journals, Isis is now available online from University of Chicago Press and back issues are available from JSTOR all the way back to 1913. So I guess I don't need my collection of back issues. There's a way that academic work is changing whose effects I can hardly imagine.