Untitled - witz cultural

Reconfi guring the AuthorErosion ofthe SelfLike contemporary critical theory hypertext reconfiguresrewrites-theauthor in several obvious ways. First of all, thefigure ofthe hypertext author approaches, even ifit does notmerge with, that of the reader; the functions of reader and writer becomemore deeply entwinedwith each otherthan everbefore.I This transformattonand near merging of roles is but the latest stage in the convergence of whathad once been two very different activities. Although today we assume thatanyone who reads can also write, historians of reading point out that for millenniamany people capable of reading could not even sign their own names.Today when we consider reading and writing, we probably think of them asserial processes or as procedures carried out intermittently by the same person:first one reads, then one writes, and then one reads some more. Hyperte$,which creates an active, even intrusive reader, carries this convergenceof activities one step closer to completion; but in so doing, it infringes on thepower of the writer, removing some of it and granting it to the reader. Theseshifts in the relations of author and reader do not, however, imply that hypertextautomatically makes readers into authors or co-authors-except, that is,in hypertext environments that give readers the ability to add links and textsto what they read.'zOne clear sign of such transference of authorial power appears in thereader's abilities to choose his or her way through the metatext, to annotatetext written by others, and to create links between documents written byothers. Read-write hypertext like Intermedia or Weblogs that accept commentsdo not permit the active reader to change the text produced by anotherperson, but it does narrow the phenomenological distance that separates