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

The Book Is Dead Long Live the BookThe book, so post-structuralists critics have long been assuring us, just isnt what it use tobeor, to be more accurate, what we used to think it was. Its no longer a discrete entity, alittle world unto itself wedged between deuce covers, a piece of discourse that speaks to us witha unified voice, the work of an individual author. Instead, as critical discourse by the likes ofBarthes (1979) and Derrida (1974) have informed us, the table of contents of one book or article areinextricably linked to dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of others, and its contents, in turn,are absorbed by other texts. Texts repair to other texts endlessly our awareness of the laboursPage 2of our predecessors battling with the written word gives rise to writing that is a dense andcomplex weave of references and allusions which lead Barthes in From Work to Text (1979)to characterise individual works as networks linked by paths, a web of texts which waseffectively authorles s.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 hasaccompanied its debut as a viable medium of information. Mention hypertext to a buster oracquaintance today, and the chances are he or she will certainly have heard of iteven if veryfew people have very seen any examples of it. Put simply, hypertext is information (usuallytext, but also graphics, video, and audio clips) that is mediated by a computing machine, generallydivided into chunks of information connected by computer links. Readers can work their waythrough texts in a variety of different orders, sometimes following sequences already mapped... ... When Freedom of Choice Fails Ideology and execution in aSecondary School Hypermedia Project. NAPA Bulletin 12 (1993) 66-72.Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Image, Music, Text. Trans. StephenHeath. New York Hill and Wang, 1977 142-149.__________. From W ork to Text. Textual Strategies Perspectives in Post-StructuralCriticism. Ed. Josu Harari. Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1979 73-82.Crane, Gregory. theme Culture The Authority of an Electronic Text. CurrentAnthropology 32.3 (1991) 293-311.Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore JohnsHopkins University Press, 1976.Edward, Deborah M. and Lynda Hardman. Lost in Hyperspace Cognitive Mapping andNavigation in a Hypertext Environment. In Hypertext Theory into Practice. Ed.Ray McAleese. Oxford mind Books, 1990 105-125.