Such global conversation is possible because the internet is not a space like a church or a town hall. Information is not bound into books sitting on the shelves of a local library. The internet is a virtual reality. By this we do not mean that it only supposes to exist. Material used in writing this paper exists only in electronic form on the world wide web, but it is just as available as the information quoted from books. There is, however, a shift of focus away from physical reality when using the internet since everything about the internet appears only on computer screens. Relational feminist ethics is leery about this as it seems to deny the value of embodiment.
When discussing embodiment we focused on the various ways in which women are taking their bodies more seriously. The internet increasingly focuses our attention on virtual space, rather than the real environments our bodies inhabit. This need not reinscribe a body/soul dualism onto the material which appears on the internet (cyberspace is not Plato's world of forms), but there is clash with the themes of embodiment that relational feminism is interested in. This is especially true concerning the concept of touch which is simply impossible in cyberspace. Relational feminist theology asserts that our best conversations will be embodied ones and in necessary confinement to computer networks a quality of conversation is lost.
Feminism assumes that relationships have a concern about the roots of oppression and about the commitment of individual to the relationship. This is perhaps one of the harshest points of conflict between relational feminism and the internet. The internet is a tool brought into existence in our current society which is still highly androcentric and patriarchal. And, unfortunately there is already empirical evidence to support women's exclusion from internet discussion groups by exactly the same means patriarchy has always used. Along these lines, questions about who makes the links or indexes them become very important to feminism.
In the end what will we see as more and more people use hypertext and experience its multilinear approach to the written word? Will we see a, "a growing trend in contemporary life toward the feminizing of society itself", or like the newspaper, the telephone, the radio, the television, the c.b. radio, the color television and the computer will the information revolution be co-opted to serve solely the oppressor, adding burdening to the oppressed.
In vermicomposting (home composting units that use worms to break down compostables), the worms need some direction from humans, for example, the careful addition of new compostables and the right amount of newspaper. In hypertext the dialogue needs maintenance by committed individuals. The hands best suited to sifting through the soil are those attached to the arms of relational feminist.
Hypertext provides a tool to test poststructuralist literary theory, instantiates one form of Deleuze and Guattari's smooth text, and, according to David Kolb, provides good ways of asking philosophical questions and opening up new territory. With the possible exception of Kolb however, who argues that the trick to using hypertext is to maintain some Socratic critical watchfulness over what is said, hypertext is too often elevated beyond the status of tool to literary genre or culture destroyer.
I believe that hypertext is analogous to the non-hierarchical understanding of relationship that feminism establishes and that hypertext allows us access, for the first time, to a way of reading texts within a relational feminist framework. I have worked to show that at least hypertext presents relational feminist ethics with a tool able to attack some of the complex and daunting tasks that will be set before it. Embedded in the decentralized, non-hierarchical roots of the internet lies an implicit foundational ethic with finds a surprising analogy in relational feminist theology. Hypertext provides a good set of tools to relational feminism and in turn, relational feminism is equipped with norms and values appropriate to the use of such tools.