(Re)Turning to Hypertext: Mattering Digital Learning Spaces

ABSTRACT This essay argues for a (re)turn to the potential of hypertext by entangling it with/in material rhetorics. A (re)turning—turning over again—troubles and decolonizes traditional understandings of hypertext as either technological product or trope by demonstrating how hypertextuality is [also] a matter of matter. More specifically, this essay uses ethnography as “deep theorization” to extend Angela Haas’s notion of wampum-as-hypertext. I analyze the hypertextual rhetoricity of matter in students’ digital learning environments and demonstrate how these places iteratively become agential and transformative, thus (re)making the digital learning experience. This theorization of digital-learning-spaces-as-hypertexts draws attention to the need to (re)conceptualize digital spaces in terms beyond that of efficiency and carefully (re)consider what it means to [better] teach with/in digitally mediated environments.