Machine made of words, ah, yes, and I love the self-referentiality of this poem.

It would work just as well without computers, wouldn't it? Tell us more about why you're using a poem that doesn't need computers in a class called Computer and Text?

Well, the course is really about cybertexts, and we'll be spending some time looking at them in print as well as on the screen. We'll probably also look at a Choose Your Own Adventure, largely so that we have something tangible to sink our teeth into when it comes time to debunk that pernicious "hypertext/cybertext is really just CYOA" myth. Let 'em _read_ one, and then see if it really holds up next to the other works we're discussing.

The course as a whole is really about a textual modality, not just "computers and texts" in the narrow sense.

Matt,

"typing it in revealed my own conditioning by media"

Do you mean condition by a history of interactions with the media i.e. habit?

Word wrapping can be turned on and off in certain text editiors. Even if the user is entering text with via word processing program that does not permit toggling between word wrap and the other option (not word wrap), that user could by practice inserting line returns. A few touch typing exercises could establish the habit.

I am asking if the concept of media extends to the sense of technology as a discursive set of rules affecting behaviour.

The question is not unrelated to the habit of reading "you" & "this" i.e. diectics as not necessarily refering to oneself when one is in the act of reading. I am more than suggesting that habits of reading lead for some people to an easy occupation of the position of the intended addressee. I am asserting that the default setting on many reading machines is the identificatory one.

Your reading seems to assume that a crypto-vocative is at play -- that "you" gets expanded as "Dear Reader". I can go with that and still not endorse a reading that assumes that the being fucked with has not yet happened. In the context of the poem by Quasha quoted by Kirschenbaum, the semantics of the signifier "read" are rewritable. What does it mean to read? To rekey with attention to line breaks? To voice aloud? To reprocess? When one tries to understand that every act of reading is in effect a rereading then one certain begins to fuck with one's mind and discover furthermore: "you" and "your mind" are not one.

Just how loopy is the little machine that does not loop may depend upon actually reading an admonishment in that poem as it loops back to its title TOO LATE -- not to read too late --- i.e. to read digitally in an anticipatory and refractory fashion. To truely read with one's human eyes ... Remember what you, Matt Kirschenbaum, wrote as a comment to Kari's blog entry on semiotics and the human visual system:

http://karik.wordherders.net/archives/000953.html

And if you are not Matt Kirschenbaum (and even if you are) go read the comment and loop back here. Time will stop and you will not be too late just belated in the elation of fuckedness !! :)