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Somnio, ergo sum
Donald Challenger
Techne and episteme
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One of the central points of contention regarding hypertext focuses on whether it is a tool or a mode of reading/writing. This debate has been fertile ground in some ways, precisely because, on operational grounds and in routine settings, we understand it to be both. As a matter of convenience, we typically articulate hypertext in terms of the mechanics of the electronic screen, the manipulation and the linking of texts, and the associative or non-linear rather than the syllogistic or narrative contiguities that such linking can create. For example, George P. Landow initially defines it as "an information technology consisting of individual blocks of text, or lexias, and the electronic links that join them." (25) Even those who consciously steer clear of "electronic" or "computer" terms in their definitions must gesture in some way to the thingness, the object-status, of the hypertextual apparatus. Hence Theodor H. Nelson, who coined the term "hypertext," writes:
By hypertext I mean non-sequential writing -- text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways. (26)
Similarly, J. Yellowlees Douglas describes
a tool that lets us use the printed word as the basis for a technology that considerably extends writing's reach and repertoire -- mostly by removing text from the single dimension it has on the printed page. (27)
And those who tend to position hypertext as an ensemble of reading/writing practices rather than a technology, such as Michael Joyce, nevertheless mark its technological status:
Hypertext is reading and writing electronically in an order you choose -- whether among choices presented for you by the writer or by your discovery of the topographic (sensual) organization of the text. Your choices, not the author's representations or the initial topography, constitute the current state of the text. You become the reader-as-writer. (28)
But while all these theorists embrace a pragmatic frame for hypertext that includes both the mechanism itself and the practices it ostensibly encourages, all take pains to make the distinction clear on theoretical grounds. Landow, for instance notes:
Any discussion of the cultural implications of hypertext and hypermedia requires, first of all, that one have some idea of both the general meaning of these terms and also the specific embodiments of them in actual systems.... A central fact about the digital word lies in its intrinsic separation of text from the physical object by means of which it is read. (29)
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"One of the perennial questions about reading on the Internet, particularly in reading hypertexts, is whether this mode of reading is something new, or whether it is the same reading, involving the usual skills and strategies, simply being exercised in a new medium -- whether, indeed, hypertext itself is even something new, or simply another attempt, this time in the digital domain, to deconstruct linear narrative. This way of framing the question, as a choice between 'new' reading or 'the same' reading, is unhelpful from the start. Reading is a practice, and as such it partakes of the contexts and social relations in which it takes place; significant differences in those contexts and relations alter the practice."
Nicholas C. Burbules, "Rhetorics of the Web: hyperreading and critical literacy"
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