Untitled - witz cultural

Hypertext and Decentrality: ThePhilosophical GroundingOne tends to think of text from within the position of the lexiaunder consideration. Accustomed to reading pages of printon paper, one tends to conceive oftext from the vantage pointofthe reader experiencing that page or passage, and that portionof text assumes a centrality. Hypertext, however, makes such assumptionsof centrality fundamentally problematic. In contrast, the linked text, theannotation, exists as the other lert, and it leads to a conception (and experience)of text as Other.In hypertext this annotation, or commentary or appended text can be anylinked text, and therefore the position of any lexia in hypertext resembles thatof the Victorian sage. For like the sage, say, Carlyle, Thoreau, or Ruskin, thelexia stands outside, offcenter, and challenges. In other words, hypertext,like the sage, thrives on marginality. From that essential marginality to whichhe stakes his claim by his skillfirl, aggressive use ofpronouns to oppose hisinterests and views to those of the reader, he defines his discursive positionor vantage point.Hypertext similarly emphasizes that the marginal has as much to offer asdoes the central, in part because hypertext refuses to grant centrality to anything,to any lexia, for more than the time a gaze rests on it. In hypertext, centrality,like beauty and relevance, resides in the mind of the beholder. LikeAndy Warhol's modern person's fifteen minutes of fame, centrality in hypertextonly exists as a matter of evanescence. As one might expect from aninformation medium that changes our relations to data, thoughts, and selvesso dramatically, that evanescence of this (ever-migrating) centrality is merelya given-that's the way things are-rather than an occasion for complaint orsatire. It is simply the condition under which-orwithin which-we think,communicate, or record these thoughts and communications in the hypertexfualdocuverse.This hypertextual dissolution of centrality, which makes the medium sucha potentially democratic one, also makes it a model of society of conversationsin which no one conversation, no one discipline or ideology, dominatesor founds the others. It is thus the instantiation of what Richard Rorty termsedifying philosophy, the point of which "is to keep the conversation goingrather than to find objective truth." It is a form of philosophyhaving sense only as a protest against attempts to close offconversation by proposalsfor universal commensuration through the hypostatization of some privileged setof descriptions. The danger which edifring discourse tries to avert is that some givenvocabulary, some way in which people might come to think of themselves, will