While talking to somebody today, I made a reference to the Panopticon, an idealized prison, but couldn’t remember the details of it. So I typed it into Google, and found this page describing it. The page turned out to be part of a collection of pages that was this guy’s master’s thesis in English, titled “Argumentation on the World Wide Web: Challenging Traditional Notions of Communication”. Lots of really interesting stuff in there describing the change in relationship between author, reader, and text. Worth a look if you’re interested in postmodern theory and related issues.