Untitled - witz cultural

82HYPERTEXT 3.0 Internet search tools can bring it to the attention of Web surfers. The edgesof a blog, like the borders of any document on the Internet, are porous andprovisional at best. Most of the time when we consider the way digital mediablur the borders of documents, we mean that links and search tools limit thepower ofauthorship. In blogs we encounter a new prose genre that also unsettlesour long-standing assumptions about public and private.Problems with Terminology:duces terminological problems much like those Barthes, Derwhatls the object we Read, ' andWhat ls a Text in HypertextlWriting about hypertext in a print medium immediately pro-rida' and others encountered when trying to describe a textu-ality neither instantiated by the physical object of the printedbook nor limited to it. Since hypertext radically changes theexperiences that reading, witing, and turt signify, how, withoutmisleading, can one employ these terms, so burdened with the assumptionsof print technology, when referring to electronic materialsl We stillread according to print technology, and we still direct almost all of what wewrite toward print modes of publication, but we can already glimpse the firstappearances of hypertexfuality and begin to ascertain some aspects of its possiblefutures. Terms so implicated with print technology necessarily confuseunless handled with ereat care. Two examples will suffice.An instance of thJ kina of probl"rr, *" f.ce appears when we try to decidewhat to call the object at which or with which one reads. The object withwhich one reads the production ofprint technology is, ofcourse, the book, orsmaller print-bearing forms, such as the newspaper or instruction sheet; forthe sake of simplicity I shall refer to "book" as the most complex instanceofprinting technology. In our culture the term book canrefer to three very differententities-the object itself, the text, or the instantiation of a particulartechnology. Calling the machine one uses to read hypertext an "electronicbook," however, would be misleading, since the machine at which one reads(and writes, and carries out other operations, including sending and receivingmail) does not itself constitute a book, a text: it does not coincide eitherwith the virtual text or with a physical embodiment of it.Additional problems arise when one considers that hypertext involves amore active reader, one who not only chooses her reading paths but also hasthe opportunity (in true read-write systems) of reading as someone who createstext; that is, at any time the person reading can assume an authorial roleand either attach links or add text to the text being read. Therefore, a term likereader, such as some computer systems employ for their electronic mailboxesor message spaces, does not seem appropriate either.3