Nicholas C. Burbules

Nicholas C. Burbules (2002); “The Web as a rhetorical place.” Silicon Literacies, Ilana Snyder, ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 75- 84, read online: http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/burbules/papers/rhetoric.html, 10. September, 2008

Burbules posits getting lost on the WWW is actually a way to find out a lot that can't be found from knowing where one is navigating. Recognizing it is a contested territory. He wonders whether the use of hypertext and its binary form limits itself to represent the complexity of a multiple, multilayered and semantically complex society, and argues that linking from point A to point B closes a system instead of leaving them open.

Burbles prefers the Web to be called a "rhetorical place" rather than a space, because a space has an objective, locational dimension, and people can move within it: "carving out a more familiar, accessible subset of the Web as a whole, and marking in various ways(individually or collectively) a set of meaningful relations within that zone." The architecture of the web creates places, rather than spaces, because of 1) movement/stasis, 2) interaction/isolation, 3)publicity/privacy, 4)visibility/hiddenness, and f) enclosure/inclusion.

The issue with hyperlinks being to linear is with how they serve as "avenues of movement and as occasions for meaning making..Links contain within them already certain kinds of navigational and semantic possibilities, and they tend to encourage some kinds of interpretation and to discourage or avoid others."

Interesting to Burbules discussion is his mention of 3rd space/hybrid space: "places are not always harmonious with one another...positions that can yield up novel and important insights precisely because they do not fall into handy categories or distinctions".