Untitled - witz cultural

83RECONFIGURINCTHE TEXTOne earlier solution was to call this reading-and-writing site a workstationby analogy to the engineer's workstation, the term assigned to a relativelyhigh-powered machine, often networked with others, that in the early 1990shad far more computing power, memory and graphic capacities than the personalcomputer. However, because workstation seems to suggest that suchobjects exist only in the workplace and find application only for gainful laboror employment, this choice of terminology also misleads. Nonetheless, Ishall employ it occasionally, if only because it seems closer to what hypertextdemands than any of the other terms thus far suggested. The problem withterminology arises, as has now become obvious, because the roles of readerand author change so much in hypermedia technology that our currentvocabulary does not have much appropriate to offer.Whatever one wishes to call the reading-and-writing site, one shouldthink of the actual mechanism that one will use to work (and play) in hypertextnot as a free-standing machine, like today's personal computer. Rather,the "object one reads" must be seen as the entrance, the magic doorway, intothe docuverse, since it is the individual reader's and writer's means of participatingin-ofbeing linked to-the world of linked hypermedia documents.A similar terminological problem appears in what to do with the termturt, which I have already employed so many times thus far in this study.More than any other term crucial to this discussion, turthas ceased to inhabita single world. Existing in two very different worlds, it gathers contradictorymeanings to itself, and one must find some way of avoiding confusion whenusing it. Frequently, in trying to explain certain points of difference, I havefound myself forced to blur old and new definitions or have discovered myselfusing the old term in an essentially anachronistic sense. For example, indiscussing that hypertext systems permit one to link a passage "in" the "text"to other passages "in" the "text" as well as to those "outside" it, one confrontsprecisely such anachronism. The kind of text that permits one to write, howeverincorrecdy,ofinsides and outsides belongs to print, whereas we arehereconsidering a form ofelectronic virhral textuality for which these already suspectterms have become even more problematic and misleading. One solutionhas been to vse text as an anachronistic shorthand for the bracketedmaterial in the following expression: "lf one were to transfer a [completeprinted] text (work), say, Milton's Paradise Lost,into electronicform, one couldlink passages within [what had been] the [original] text (Milton's poem) toeach other; and one could also link passages to a wide range of materials outsidethe original text to it." The problem is, ofcourse, that as soon as one convertsthe printed text to an electronic one, it no longer possesses the same