Bolter writes:

The scribes of the ancient world made relatively little use of the margins of papyrus rolls; the invention of the codex allowed for larger and more accessible margins. The margins of a medieval manuscript often belonged to the scholarly reader: they were the reader's space for conducting a dialogue with the text. The margins defined a zone in which the text could extend into the world of the reader. And during generations of copying, text could also move from the margins into the center, as glosses from readers made their way into the text itself. In the age of print, marginal notes became truly marginal, part of the hierarchy of the text that only the author defined and controlled: eventually they became footnotes and endnotes. Readers could still insert their own notes with a pen, where there was sufficient white space, but these handwritten notes could no longer have the same status as the text itself. They were private reactions to a public text. Today's scholars are extremely interested in finding books that were owned and commented on by Newton, or Erasmus, or Shelley. But such comments could only enter into the public life of the text, if and when a later editor took them into account in preparing a new edition. When deconstructionists play upon the dichotomy between the center and the margin, they are assuming a written or more probably a printed text, which naturally favors the center over the margin. In general, whenever the theorists set out to reverse a literary hierarchy, they are assuming the technology of printing (or sometimes handwriting) that generates or enforces that hierarchy.

If the margins that concern Derrida and deconstruction are the borders of the printed or written page, what can they say about electronic texts? We have seen that a text in electronic space has no necessary margins, no fixed boundaries except for the ultimate limitations of the machine. In "Afternoon" the margins yield to the reader, and this yielding serves as a safety valve to prevent the text from disintegrating under the force of a deconstructive reading. The electronic writing space can support a network in which all elements have equal status and to be at the margin is itself only provisional. The author can extend and ramify this textual network limited only by the available memory. The reader can follow paths through the space in any direction, limited only by constraints established by the author. No path through the space need be stigmatized as marginal. In future electronic fictions, the reader too may be allowed to change the structure of the text, to extend its borders in ways the author has not anticipated. All texts in the computer are therefore like geodetic lines in spherical geometry finite, but unbounded. Furthermore the connections can extend beyond one author's texts to many. We have already discussed the electronic library, which could include books of all ages and subject matters, all organized into a reticulated network of topics. In such a library all boundaries are fluid: pages dissolve into sections or chapters, chapters into volumes, and volumes into the larger structures of the library.

Jay David Bolter. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Fairlawn, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991.

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