Davida Charney’s article on “The Effect of Hypertext on Processes of Reading and Writing” and Linda Flower’s chapter on “Intercultural Inquiry and the Transformation of Service,” while at first seem to be about completely different topics, are actually interconnected in a very precise manner. Intercultural inquiry allows “readers” of their surroundings to actively seek information from any person they choose. Nobody is sitting with them and showing them the map by which they need to sequentially follow a mode for inquiry. In this sense, learning through life is much like a hypertext: we are free to navigate through it at our leisure, using the resources about us in any way we see fit in order to reach a destination of our choosing.
When we are faced with a situation with which we’ve never dealt, it is easy to project what we know upon the circumstances in front of us. Different prejudices and past experiences may cause us to put up shields or to assume a situation that appears to resemble a past experience will turn out the same way in which we are familiar. But what Flower seems to be saying in this chapter is that we cannot allow our past experiences or assumptions to interfere with learning about others, and about learning new ways of dealing with others. When we project our fears (namely, the fear of the “other,” the unknown, and through the stereotypes we have heard about), we hinder expansion and ability to grow through the attainment of knew knowledge. Ideally, when we engage in a community service activity, we will learn as much as the people which we are “servicing.” In other words, it’s not so much a server/receiver relationship as it is an exchange of knowledge and translation of unfamiliar circumstances.
This is the kind of inquiry that Charney seems to be depicting when she discusses the literacy technology of hypertext. In developing the technology, designers try to achieve the same effect as intercultural inquiry, setting up complex works in an interconnected fashion through which a reader (a learner) will navigate as he sees fit. When I am working with a group of people, a discussion will lead me to inquire of somebody their own opinions or experiences and that conversation will thus lead to more inquiry and a rich experience of exchange will conjure up ideas that no one at that table could have anticipated from the beginning. Ideally, hypertext is designed to act in a similar fashion. One idea expressed in a work will lead to the citation (the conversation through which the text was generated to begin with), and the next text will lead to the conversation with which it was engaged and so on. And if the reader is actively engrossed in the intertwined, intermingled academic conversations, he will make his own unique connections and discover his own hypotheses and ideas. Hypertext, then, is an electronic exchange of ideas through time and space, a conversation that could possibly mimic the organic conversation of face-to-face exchanges, but in a way that no two people living in the same time period could accomplish. This is how hypertext could be valued. This is how we’ve come to value intercultural inquiry, and this is how our horizons are expanded to infinite possibilities.
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