Abstract

A decade ago, my colleagues and I (Geisler et al., 2001) published an IText manifesto in the Journal of Business and Technical Communication to call attention to the impact of information technologies with texts at their core. These ITexts, we claimed, represented ‘‘a new page in the story of the coevolution of humanity, culture, and technology,’’ promising to change both the nature of texts and their role in society. The manifesto arose out of discussions in May 2000 at the annual meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America on the future of research on text-making activities and how they affect and are affected by new information technologies. About 14 months later, the IText manifesto was published in the pages of this journal. Three years later, a special issue of JBTC illustrated ‘‘the ubiquity of IText’’ with articles on Web technologies, dictation, screen capture, and text visualization (Geisler, 2004).