The knowledge architectures of libraries, universities, conferences,
personal book shelves, desks, books hops, newspapers ... may all be implemented
- with more or less ease - directly on the screen.
Whereas the thought imaging of modernity took place primarily on the surfaces
of the pages of books[15], postmodern
thinking, researching and imagining processes are played out directly on or in
front of monitors - and the "literature" of the information age is becoming a
network of interlinking files. In print culture, the productive moments of the
creation of new compilations, versions and constellations of text remained a
privilege reserved to the writers - who were virtually 'online' with
literature, science, collective memory. What is outstanding about online
texts is less their stylistic and rhetorical figures or the use of
metaphorical phrasing, but rather their context-related activities, the
switching back and forth between different levels, cross references, the
rapidity of the exchange - they address the space between the various fragments
of text, staging and reworking intertextual structures.
The crucial paradigms[16] for a model for
hypertext developments stem from Nelson's early vision of the universal and
open on-line information network "XANADU"[17]: linking numerous documents in a distributed network to
form a global metadocument, multimediality, object-oriented forms of
access...
In many ways, the developers of the WWW refer to Nelson's proposals, although
he himself, in the manner of an unrecognized genius, denies any similarities
between the WWW and his Docuverse proposals.
The thematic subdivisions of the search engines in the WWW or the special
thematic index tables treat the "whole Web" as an archive encompassing the
globe, which only needs to be searched, in which information only needs to be
appropriately prepared.
History is always written from the perspective of those who are stationary
... The Old Testament lists of generations are hierarchical family trees
constituting a linear image of history with self-reproducing power structures.
Yet how may the stories be told of the often winding biographies, the radical
alignments, utopias, passions, private obsessions ... without reference to the
grand narratives? Setting off, stealing away, crossing the horizon, departing...
[15] Emerging technical media have inspired
literature since the turn of the century and led to a reflection on indications
of disintegration in literature (Futurism, Noveau Roman, James Joyce). "The
word writing system (...) may also be used to refer to the network of
techniques and institutions that enable a given culture to retrieve, store and
process relevant data.(...) Thus although all libraries are writing systems,
not all writing systems are books. (...) Archeologists of the present must also
acknowledge the storage, transfer and calculation of data in technical media."
Friedrich Kittler: Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, Munich 1987, p. 429
16 http://hoschi.cic.sfu.ca/~guay/Paradigm/History.html