The text and it's receptical need to be separated.
ROM texts are what we think about: Read only, finished, final draft, published. That notion is loosing out to disarticulated texts that are open, there to be added to, transformed, "disaggregated, manipulated, and reaggregated without damaging the text per se or the author" (239).
In history we have moments of interpolation (open texts are the expected norm) and philological moments--holy and whole--(traces of the original and final, intended (book) are our obsession) (240).
Primative texts are not closed. Writing made obvious the possibility of a closed text. Plato, stable texts "bristling with dangers" (244). Middle Ages an age of interpolation: books are to be divided, annotated, expounded, . . . .
The dissertation process architypal philological strategy: authority of student assumed, originality distiguised from others, final text closed by author and no others.
However, in the C&W crowd their is a move toward rewards for developing composing systems (educational MOOs, Daedalus, . . .) and sites of articulation (Kairos, Rhetnet, CIWIC, ACW, . . . .) in which the cumulative discourse of the discipline or the students being trained in that discipline can construct meaning. "[T]he time is heralded when the protective membrane of the texts will decompose and they will once more become open texts as in the Middle Ages with al the standard concomitant presuppositions\" (249).
Even now, as she says, the author fades (251) in Kairos, ACW, . . . .
"Writing technology will bring about changes in the collective consciousness and sooner or the closed and protected text will be a thing of the past" (251).
My claim is that computing will make it easier to change the status of the author and the text, BUT that our cultural publishing practices, ethics, procedures, and laws will be just as important in how open the "text" actually becomes.