As a DJ, my challenge is to make sense of these disparate moments, to mix down the places I've isolated and set the work into play. In other words, with my records spinning in the mix, I need to compose. I do so through the DJ model as well as its analogous cyber mantra echoed in William Gibson's famous dictum from the story "Burning Chrome": "The Street Finds Its Own Use for Things."
For Gibson, the objects, languages, codes, ideas we collect are reappropriated in new, alternative ways as digital culture fashions a zone of writing as appropriation. Unlike Wells's Citizen Kane, the new student writer, with Gibson's directive in mind, does not choose film as the medium for digital writing. Instead, she opts for hypertext, the new digital writing for computer-based writing instruction.

My choice of hypertext is motivated by the 1996 publication of Cynthia Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Charles Moran, and Paul Leblanc's history of computers and writing, Computers and the Teaching of Writing in American Higher Education, 1979-1994: A History, which begins with the year 1979. The authors choose 1979 to begin their history, mentioning that composition studies' early interest in technology focused on grammar and style checkers.