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TRANSFORMING TEXTS 37

ventions because students do not have to imagine an "ideal" reader or
writer. Nor do the students have to imagine the assumptions these
readers and writers have, although misinterpretation of a writer's
statement can and does occur. As a result, students are cognizant of
the relationships they wish to form online. In turn, as each class inter-
acts on a discussion list, for instance, not only does a community of
writers form, but specific discursive rules for that class arise. Misin-
terpretations generally happen when one student applies the dis-
course rules from one class to another. It seems that the context
dependency of the class postings does not permit discourse rules to
transfer across contexts. Violations of the established rules of dis-
course for the class are frequently met with assorted flames, silence,
or questions for the violators to clarify their positions.
As threads multiply, instructors familiar with electronic commu-
nication notice that written collaboration begins as well, as students
(and sometimes the instructor) contribute ideas to, delete unwanted
information from, and alter their positions across a discussion. If in-
structors follow the patterns of conversation, intelligent discussions
emerge through the associations and connections each writer makes
with others by sharing his or her individual views instead of follow-
ing prescriptive rules for writing to an audience or to a genre.
Another significant part of the mundane text, especially as it per-
tains to networked writing environments, is the medium in which
the writer produces the text. For instance, in popular culture and in
many academic journal articles, computers are often mythologized
as being a "transparent" medium. Because most of the current soft-
ware programs simulate familiar objects (files, folders, pieces of
flying paper, document icons, file cabinets, etc.) rather than com-
mand lines of computer code, some people assume that users can
see how a program works in its physical structure. Most computer
users in the academy, even fairly sophisticated ones, find the ma-
chine itself and its inner workings are nearly impossible to compre-
hend; few actually know how a CPU processes data or how a
network sends data packets of information. Even fewer care how
the computer functions as long as when they boot up the system all
parts are in working order. Unless one is writing on an older iMac
and can see the lights and wires flickering under the shell, visually a
computer is a fairly opaque thing compared with pen and paper.
Transparency, then, is a double-edged term: Transparency can mean
either completely visible or invisible, depending on the user's point of