4. Imposing

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For years, reading theorists argued vehemently about whether the reader or the text played the greater role in determining meaning. The most notorious moment in those debates was the publication of Stanley Fish’s essay, “Who’s Afraid of Wolfgang Iser?” Fish, the primary advocate of the position that the reader constituted the text challenged Iser’s more balanced view—the text guides the reader. Hyper-reading is not likely to renew this debate. In constructive hyper-reading, there is no doubt that the reader is in charge and that the text is subservient to the reader’s wish. Such hyper-readers impose their frame-works on the texts they peruse. Yet, this is not the scandal it seemed to be when some reading theorists argued that readers create the literary texts they read. A simple analogy shows why. Hyper-readers of the Web parallel readers of telephone books (as the Internet Yellow Pages CD ROM invites us to believe). Pages on the Web are not held in the high esteem that pages of Shakespeare or Milton have been. Consequently, to regard them as information is quite common and in most cases more than justified. Just as telephone books hold little significance until they are queried for a relevant address, so the information available on the Web holds little significance until hyper-readers search it for items relevant to their inquiries. Granting that queries impose significance on the pages of the Web, do they impose meaning? Taking a somewhat moderate stance, I would argue that readers do not create the meaning of electronic texts any more than they create the meaning of printed texts but that they do make them significant. By framing texts, readers assimilate them to their interests and hence render them significant in the context of their concerns. The significance of the text, in this sense, is more important than its “meaning.” This can be most readily seen when hyper-readers abandon reading book length e-texts or articles from beginning to end and query them for data relevant to their reSEARCH. In this respect, we encounter what Umberto Eco refers to in The Role of the Reader as “unlimited semiosis”(193ff). Many academics will regard this as a loss of meaning parallel to seeing the film instead of reading the novel.