Untitled - witz cultural

84HYPERTEXT 3.0 kind oftextuality. In the following pages such references to text have to be understood,therefore, to mean "the electronic version of a printed text."The question of what to call "text" in the medium of hypermedia leadsdirectly to the question of what to include under that rubric in the first place.This question in turn immediately forces us to recognize that hypertextreconfigures the text in a fundamental way not immediately suggested by thefact of linking. Hypertertuality, like all digital texruality, inevitably includes afar higher percentage of nonverbal information than does print; the comparativeease with which such material can be appended encourages its inclusion.Hypertext, in other words, to some degree implements Derrida's callfor a new form of hieroglyphic writing that can avoid some of the problemsimplicit and therefore inevitable in Western writing systems and their printedversions. Derrida argues for the inclusion of visual elements in writing asa means of escaping the constraints of linearity. Commenting on this thrustin Derrida's argument, Gregory Ulmer explains that grammatology thereby"confronts" four millennia during which anything in language that "resistedlinearization was suppressed. Briefly stated, this suppression amounts to thedenial of the pluridimensional character of symbolic thought originally presentin the 'mlthogram' (Leroi-Gourhan's term), or nonlinear writing (pictographicand rebus writing)" (Applied Grammatology,8). Derrida, who asks fora new pictographic writing as a way out of logocentrism, has to some extenthad his requests answered in hypertext. N. Katherine Hayles argues that digitaltext alone, even without links, emphasizes the visual, because "the computerrestores and heightens the sense of word as image-an image drawnin a medium as fluid and changeable as water" (26).Because hypertext systems link together passages of verbal text withimages as easily as they link two or more passages of text, hypertext includeshypermedia, and I therefore use the two terms interchangeably. Moreover,since computing digitizes both alphanumeric symbols and images,electronic text in theory easily integrates the two. In practice, popular wordprocessingprograms, such as Microsoft Word, have increasingly featured thecapacity to include graphic materials in text documents, and, as we shall see,this capacity to insert still and moving images into alphanumeric text is oneof the characterizing features of HTML. Linking, which permits an author tosend the reader to an image from many different portions of the text, makessuch integration of visual and verbal information even easier.In addition to expanding tlre quantity and diversity of alphabetic and nonverbalinformation included in the text, computer text provides visual elementsnot found in printed work. Perhaps the most basic of these is the cur-