In Internet Invention, Ulmer breaks down the popcycle into four main quadrants: Career, Family, Entertainment, and Community. After operating on an earlier tripartite structure from Teletheory (Discipline, Pop culture, Personal) for most of my mystory, I was interested in seeing how my original indexed material would break down into the new structure, which is only a slight revision from the popcycle in Heuretics.

Career (Discipline) Cats Chance Chora Decomposition Emblem Genet Glas Hegel Laughter Mystory Name Rhetoric Ulmer WAC

Family (Personal) Art Atlanta Bystory Matriarchy Patriarchy Wilderness

Entertainment (Pop culture) Erasure Celebrity Image Music Technology Title Uncanny

Community (History, School) Apollo Big Yellow Horus School Teaching Texas Texas Pics

I always felt that I needed to develop the pop cultural aspects of my mystory, and after looking at this breakdown I added another page or two to that quadrant. It has really made me look at the project differently. Rather than the more open, organic development I took earlier in the process, I'm starting to think in terms of the categories and I'm wondering how that will affect the future development of the project. The thing I noticed the most through this exercise is that it was often difficult to classify a page because the majority of them are engaging multiple quadrants at once. This type of interweaving (felt) is precisely the kind of textuality Ulmer is ultimately after, so I hope that classification doesn't move me away from this more dense interweaving.

I can see why Ulmer breaks Internet Invention down into parts that correspond to the popcycle, but one of the main troubles I had with teaching the book was the fact that a discussion of linking doesn't come until later. This confused a number of students. They weren't sure yet why they were generating material for the quadrants. I started my initial mystory with the concept of linking (conduction). I definitely think this affected the whole undertaking. From the first word I was thinking about how things would link up to other things and this, more often than not, drove the content as well as the organization. Starting with the content and structure and then looking for links may ultimately produce fewer interconnections.

[Side note: I do note the irony that the index and this alternate TOC are both products of literacy. Even though I chose alphabetical organization with Barthes in mind, I still called it an index. I wanted readers to have multiple ways into the text since not everyone is comfortable with the hypertextual, conductive linking within the text. Clearly I (we?) haven't shaken the call of remediation.]