Contrary to what people may assume, the long distance academic marriage is not really a phenomenon unique to our time. Writing from her abbey, responding to a letter Peter Abelard has sent her, Heloise expresses gratitude that it "at least is a way of restoring your presence" (110). In saying this, perhaps she is offering him consolation that their experience of both distance and intimacy is not uncommon among the lettered; to this end, she quotes Seneca who is writing back to his friend Lucius: "I have never had a letter from you without the immediate feeling that we are together. If pictures of absent friends give us pleasure, renewing our memories and relieving the pain of separation even if they cheat us with empty comfort, how much more welcome is a letter which comes to us in the very handwriting of an absent friend" (110). For Seneca, a person’s unique handwriting is more palpable and therefore more psychically important than Lucius’ portrait can ever be—the handwriting a synecdoche, the portrait a metonymy; the handwriting inherently an extension of the person, the portrait inevitably a mediation in the form of a painter’s skill; the one personally connected, the other circumstantially connected and thus at a greater remove from the person himself. These ancients, as is true for us today, value the genuine article. Or is it the same, nowadays?

Both the handwritten letter and the painted portrait are prostheses, extensions of Lucius; and they are both, semiologically, texts. How might either compare with, say, the telephone? Heloise’s point is that, essentially, she can have Abelard with her in or through his letter. Yet how, precisely? Having studied the practices of phone sex workers, Rosanne Allucquère Stone (an ex-computer programmer and now a professor) came to realize that she "was observing very practical applications of data compression." It is odd that human relations can be reduced to something so simple as this; nonetheless, Stone explains how it might be so:

By sketching out this transfer issue, I mean to draw attention to the relationship between literacy and identity. Taken together, the stories of Seneca and Lucius, of Heloise and Abelard, and of the phone sex workers, raise doubts about what commonly, in the modern world, has been thought to have been personal selfhood when it is conditioned by literacy. Walter Ong and many other scholars have demonstrated how the very nature of thinking, the sense of personal identity and the capacity for self-definition, are all profoundly different for people living in oral societies than for people of literate societies that are organized around writing and especially around the artifact of the printed book. The book provides a sense of control, the possibility of a singular voice, and closure. Integral to the book-as-artifact is self-containment, which has been the prototype for the self-contained human. Marshall McLuhan, Ong and others have maintained that all printed text has allowed for a consistency of tone and argument (McLuhan Gutenberg 126-7, 135-6) and a "fixed point of view" (Ong 135) that "gave birth to the romantic notions of ‘originality’ and ‘creativity’ and that set apart an individual work from other works […,] seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence […]" (Ong 133).

Today, however, we are living in what I would like to call a post-literate society wherein we experience texts differently than we did in the modern world. The crucial issue that arises in this comparison, which is hinted at in the phone-sex story, is that we are now experiencing a problem of definition when we try to understand what we mean, not only by the term text, but also by the terms self, person and body. And, as teachers, until we come to appreciate the fundamental transformation of our lives’ texture—of their textual nature—we will not be able to address the issue of student literacy comprehensively, and of both the reading and writing processes generally. In his 1964 study Understanding Media McLuhan wrote that electronic media relocate "our central nervous system [within] a global embrace, abolishing both space and time" (19). Here he intends to undermine facticity as grounded in the body. Perhaps taking her cue from him, Christina Haas has commented, "The materiality of writing is both the central fact of literacy and its central puzzle [….] because writing gains its power—as a cognitive process, as a cultural practice, and even as a metaphor—by linking these two powerful systems: the material realm of time and space with the quintessentially human act of language" (3). The uniting of space/time with language creates discursive space. Stone, moreover, describes the "link between a discursive space and a physical space as [a] warranting" (40; my italics) upon which is based our modern conceptions of law including the principal of habeas corpus.

This link, however, has been severed by our new communication technologies, most prominently the Internet. Likewise, multimedia communication, in the future, will fundamentally alter our relationship as readers and writers to what we casually understand to be words and will, interestingly, draw us closer to the worlds of Seneca and Heloise than to those of Jane Austen or James Joyce. The Internet invokes the perhaps capricious notion of virtuality. What, then, can we possibly mean by virtual reality as somehow existing apart from plain and simple reality? Stone argues that "the physical/virtual distinction is not a mind/body distinction. The concept of mind is not part of virtual systems theory, and the virtual component of the socially apprehensible citizen is not a disembodied thinking thing, but rather a different way of conceptualizing a relationship to the human body" (40).

The experience of reading a book is the apprehension of words on a page, words existing as over and against their reader, a reader who is a person apart from them; the words on the page represent to their reader concepts and possibly suggest sounds and images. On the other hand, the electronic hypertext—which is the forerunner of future immersive so-called "smart" environments—can include dynamic words, not words relatively inert as they are in a book; rather, the electronic word’s parameters and depths of effect can partake of actual—not mental—sound, image and even touch. Indeed, such imagery and sound can metamorphose, be synchronized and otherwise merge, with words—words surrounding the reader as a sort of living text. Hence, the experience of reading changes profoundly and dramatically. Unlike the linearity of print-based discourse, "[h]ypertext is all about connection, linkage, and affiliation," observes Stuart Moulthrop (18); it adheres to a new paradigm called connectionism, "a term," Sadie Plant has noted,

Lochrie demonstrates the importance to mysticism particularly, and medieval reading and writing generally, of the textual aporeia that is the essence of what she calls the fissured text, a text corresponding to the fissured body. Fissured text and body foreground the present-day struggle for selfhood precipitated by a similar vitiation of corporeal distinctness now being brought about through the vast array of computerized prostheses and, along with them, the reinstitution of the textual metaphor that lies at the heart of daily life, most notably in the form of the human genome project. "If the fissured flesh permits the transgression of that imaginary zone of Christianity, the integrity of the body," Lochrie asks, then "what is its textual equivalent? The fissured text also permits perviousness […] but the effect of this perviousness is a breakdown of a construct which otherwise rests securely on the external/internal demarcation of the body […]" (70).
 
 

In the postmodern world, the body has lost its moorings and boundaries, and we are confronted by an epistemological uncertainty. As O. B. Hardison has commented, modern science
 
 

With computing, the essential nature of the machine becomes code, so too the body becomes, once again, a text. Yet the model for textuality also shifts in another way—as is dramatized by the Internet. Silvio Gaggi writes that the "effect of hypertext [subverts] the very sense of a primary text with a defined beginning, a dominant axis of movement, and a clear end" (102). This subversion affects the notion of authorship as grounded in a voice and otherwise an identity, which are determined by narrative as conceived of in keeping with modern principles. In large, Gaggi concludes,

The most readily available motif of this postmodern narratology—or lack thereof, if you will—is the now well known, or shall I say notorious, fictional cyborg, a blend of natural and technological. Because of straight-faced predictions by engineers (like Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines) that any part of the human body will someday be replicated, we can now all think of ourselves as potential cyborgs. Yet the cyborg turns out to be no mere combination. Diane Greco explains that, "[w]hereas the raw materials of her hybrid body construct the cyborg self, she is, by virtue of her hybrid status, outside the traditional essentialist loop. Her relation to this loop, however, is more complicated than that; technology positions her outside it, yet she cannot avoid the influence of her very special body on her self-concept. To essentialize her is to acknowledge that she is in part the product of technology that, because it is not original to her body and her self, calls into question the notion of essentialism itself; this irony is at the center of her self-construction" (Greco "destiny 2").

Like the medieval fissured text, the cyborg presents us with a slippage in the separation between discourse and physicality, which affects the social construction of the self. "[V]irtual worlds create discursive spaces in which the boundaries of the self are fluid—intermingling with the consciousness of others, often machines" (Greco "cyborg 3"). While the reality of physical existence can now be expressed as either computer or DNA coding (both of which, by the way, are controlled in the United States by the body of law that governs information commerce), "[s]ocial reality," Donna Haraway has said, "is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction" (149).

In conclusion, I would like to claim that what today we think of as the self is no longer as identifiable as it was just some decades ago when Julia Kristeva observed that "Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations [and is] the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity" (66). What she was signaling was the relinquishing of any expectation of univocal writing. The electronic text (the latest version of textual reproduction that was anticipated by, for instance, the typewriter, linotype and photocopy machines) undermines even that idea, and creates another paradigm altogether. In contrast to the textuality of modernism,today’s electronic hypertextuality is protean. Our interactions, essentially textual in nature, like ourselves, will be viewed as part of us in ways the vocabulary of modernity is incapable of capturing. The human presence Heloise and Seneca prized, contained in prosthetic devices like handwriting and portrait painting, were deciphered by readers and viewers who stood apart from them—an advantage or disadvantage we experience less and less as our technologies envelope and become us.