Replacement of the Book with Computers Essay -- Reading Electronic Tex

The Book Is Dead! Long Live the Book! The book, so post-structuralists critics have long been assuring us, just isn't what it used to be—or, to be more accurate, what we used to think it was. It's no longer a discrete entity, a little world unto itself wedged between two covers, a piece of discourse that speaks to us with a unified voice, the work of an individual author. Instead, as critical discourse by the likes of Barthes (1979) and Derrida (1974) have informed us, the contents of one book or article are inextricably linked to dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of others, and its contents, in turn, are absorbed by other texts. Texts refer to other texts endlessly: our awareness of the labours Page 2 of our predecessors battling with the written word gives rise to writing that is a dense and complex weave of references and allusions which lead Barthes in â€Å"From Work to Text† (1979) to characterise individual works as networks linked by paths, a web of texts which was effectively authorless. The striking similarities between hypertext and the Text as described by post- structuralist critics accounts, in part, for the magnitude and scope of the hype that has accompanied its debut as a viable medium of information. Mention hypertext to a colleague or acquaintance today, and the chances are he or she will certainly have heard of it—even if very few people have actually seen any examples of it. Put simply, hypertext is information (usually text, but also graphics, video, and audio clips) that is mediated by a computer, generally divided into chunks of information connected by computer links. Readers can work their way through texts in a variety of different orders, sometimes following sequences already mapped... ... â€Å"When Freedom of Choice Fails: Ideology and Action in a Secondary School Hypermedia Project.† NAPA Bulletin 12 (1993): 66-72. Barthes, Roland. â€Å"The Death of the Author.† Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977: 142-149. __________. â€Å"From Work to Text.† Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structural Criticism. Ed. Josuà © Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979: 73-82. Crane, Gregory. â€Å"Composing Culture: The Authority of an Electronic Text.† Current Anthropology 32.3 (1991): 293-311. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Edward, Deborah M. and Lynda Hardman. â€Å"‘Lost in Hyperspace’: Cognitive Mapping and Navigation in a Hypertext Environment.† In Hypertext: Theory into Practice. Ed. Ray McAleese. Oxford: Intellect Books, 1990: 105-125.