In making available these points, hypertext has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and semiological theory, particularly with Derrida's emphasis on de-centering and with Barthes's conception of the readerly versus the writerly text. In fact, hypertext creates an almost embarrassingly literal embodiment of both concepts, one that in turn raises questions about them and their interesting combination of prescience and historical relations (or embeddedness).
This technology -- that of the printed book and its close relations, which include the typed or printed page -- engenders certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text that hypertext makes untenable
Its effects are so basic, so radical, that it reveals that many of our most cherished, most commonplace, ideas and attitudes toward literature and literary production turn out to be the result of that particular form of information technology and technology of cultural memory that has provided the setting for them.
Electronic linking shifts the boundaries between one text and another as well as between the author and the reader and between and the teacher and the student.
Print technology similarly redefined the audience for literature by transforming it from

a small group of manuscript readers or listeners . . . to a group of readers . . . who bought books to read in the privacy of their homes
Nelson, Miller, and almost all authors on hypertext who touch upon the political implications of hypertext assume that the technology is essentially democratizing and that it therefore supports some sort of decentralized, liberated existence.
During the shift from manuscript to print culture "an older system of polite or courtly letters -- primarily oral, aristocratic, authoritarian, court-centered -- was swept away . . . and gradually replaced by a new print-based, market-centered, democratic literary system" whose fundamental values "were, while not strictly determined by print ways, still indirectly in accordance with the actualities of print" (Printing Technology, 4).
the democratizing potential of the new information technology
what then will be the effects of the parallel shift from print to computer hypertext?

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Analogues to the Gutenberg Revolution

Tags: beyondetext, hypertext, landow, mediatedcultures on 2006-08-16 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The third lesson or rule one can derive from the work of Kernan and other historians of the relations among reading practice, information technology, and culture is that that transformations have political contexts and political implications.
Kernan also points to the "tension, if not downright contradiction, between two of the primary energies of print logic, multiplicity and fixity -- what we might call `the remainder house' and the `library' effects" (55), each of which comes into play, or becomes dominant, only under certain economic, political, and technological conditions.
Kernan himself points out that "knowledge of the leading principles of print logic, such as fixity, multiplicity, and systematization, makes it possible to predict the tendencies but not the exact ways in which they were to manifest themselves in the history of writing and in the world of letters.
Books of hours, marriage charters, and so-called evangelical books all embodied a "basic tension between public, ceremonial, and ecclesiastical use of the book or other print object, and personal, private, and internalized reading."
J. David Bolter and other historians of writing have pointed out, for example, that initially writing, which served priestly and monarchical interests in recording laws and records, appeared purely elitist, even hieratic; later, as the practice diffused down the social and economic scale, it appeared democratizing, even anarchic. To a large extent, printed books had similarly diverse effects, though it took far less time for the democratizing factors to triumph over the hieratic -- a matter of centuries, perhaps decades, instead of millennia!
understanding the logic of a particular technology cannot permit simple prediction because under varying conditions the same technology can produce varying, even contradictory, effects
The second chief rule is that studying the relations of technology to literature and other aspects of humanistic culture does not produce any mechanical reading of culture, such as that feared by Jameson and others.
According to Kernan, not until about 1700 did print technology "transform the more advanced countries of Europe from oral into print societies, reordering the entire social world, and restructuring rather than merely modifying letters" (9).
First of all, such transitions take a long time,
what can we predict about the future by understanding the "logic" of a particular technology or set of technologies?

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O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0

Tags: mediatedcultures, phantom, web2.0 on 2006-08-14 and saved by464 people -All Annotations (30) -About

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Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication