"We have taught with the core CD ROM and associated websites over 2 years to more than 2,000 students. Writing for the CD ROM utilised all the preliminary laterality of mindmapping. We set up the supportive architecture for delivery of the users' journeys as a museum walk through exhibition spaces. There are multiple layers and choices. These include Australian white history, Aboriginal Dreamtime and a main exhibition Cruising the Superhighway: Australian Culture on the Move."

Image from the CD ROM Oz 21 Australia's Cultural Dreaming SLIDE SHOW

ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates how the colonisation of cyberspace provides an opportunity for feminist poetics in the production of cybertexts. It recognises the paradox of doing so in print by trying to simulate hotwords to give the reader some interactivity and to acknowledge the readers¹ power over the text. It looks at the ways in which cultural theory and practice intersect in the colonisation of cyberspace and investigates the feminist potentials for difference in the production of the cybertext using as a case study the CD ROM Oz 21 Australia¹s Cultural Dreaming, which I co-author.

Poetics are involved in producing discourse which understands the intricacies of the holistic nature of our species and accepts a full range of human activities as valuable. In doing this, the binary opposites which provide power for the Œright¹ way of enacting our culture give way to multiple possibilities, all acceptable.

Poetics, then, have a much more free and roving view of what a text is like, how it can be read, and the kind of information it conveys as important. There is no model way of performing poetics: each experience consists of a reader coming to terms with her or his own self through a navigation of the writers¹ thoughts, ideas, feelings, wordskills and knowledge. There is no final authoritative conclusion in such works: they are offered for co-navigation, for readerly-writing. They contrast to AUTHORity in prose books and templates in electronic texts.

Feminist poetics opens a space for feminists not only to be involved in the colonisation of cyberspace but also to establish that multiple possibilities of textuality and discourse are valued in its construction rather than old hierarchies being re-enacted.