Untitled - witz cultural

1't0HYPERTEXT 3.0bring about. The achievement of the Scholastics, pre-eminently among theworld's scribal elites, was to conventionalize the themes, plot and shapes ofbooks in a truly rigorous way, as they also structured syllabuses, scripture anddebate" (69). Their conventions of book stmcture, however, changed fundamentallywith the advent of the printing press, which encouraged alphabeticordering, a procedure that had never before caught on. WhylOne reason must certainly be that people had already become accustomed over toomany centuries to thematically ordered material. Such material bore a close resemblanceto the "normal" organization of written work: ... Alphabetization may alsohave been offensive to the global Scholastic view of things. lt must have seemed aperverse, disjointed and ultimately meaningless way of ordering material to men whowere interestedneat frames for containing all knowledge. Certainly, alphabetizationposes problems of fragmentation that may be less immediately obvious withword lists but can become serious when dealing with subject lists. (75-77)McAr*rur's salutary remarks, which remind us how we always naturalize thesocial constructions of our world, also suggest that from one point of viewthe Scholastics', the movement from manuscript to print and then to hypertextappears one of increasing fragmentation. As long as a thematic or otherculturally coherent means of ordering is available to the reader, the fragmentationof the hypertext document does not imply the kind of entropy thatsuch fragmentation would have in the world of print. Capacities such as fulltextsearching, automatic linking, agents, and conceptual filtering potentiallyhave the power to retain the benefits of hypertextr-rality while insulating thereader from the ill effects of abandonins lineariF.Beginnings in the Open TextThe concepts (and experiences) of beginning and endingimply linearity. What happens to them in a form of texrualitynot governed chiefly by linearityl If we assume that hypertextualitypossesses multiple sequences rather than that it has an entire absenceof linearity and sequence, then one answer to this query must be that it providesmultiple beginnings and endings rather than single ones. Theoristswhose model of hypertert is the Word Wide Web might disagree with thisclaim. Marie-Laure Ryan, for example, asserts that "every hypertext has afixed entry point-there must be an address to reach first before the systemof links can be activated" (226). Although many web and other hyperfictionsseem to support that statement, examples in various hypertext environmentsshow that such is not the case. foyce's afi.emoon, which was published inthe Page Reader format, does have a fixed starting point, but other works