Untitled - witz cultural

xivPREFACEacademic standing by critical theory, but websites, blogs, discussion lists,and new media arts flourish despite the bankruptcy of many ill-conceivedcomputer-related businesses, some of which never managed to produce anythingmore than vaporware.I don t believe this change in situation lessens the value of one of the mainapproaches of this book, its use of hypertext and late-twentieth-century criticaltheory to illuminate each other. As I stated repeatedly in the earlier versionsof this book, the writings of Roland Barthes, facques Derrida, and othercritical theorists neither caused the development of hypermedia nor coincidedexactly with it. Nonetheless, their approach to texhrality remains very helpfulin understanding our experience of hypermedia. And vice versa. I have hadmany students in my hypertext and literary theory class who have told methat they found the writings of Barthes, Derrida, Michel Foucault, and GillesDeleuze and F6lix Guattari easier to understand after the experience ofreadingand writing hypertexts. Others have agreed that these theorists, particularlyDerrida and Barthes, provide useful ways to think about hypertext.Perhaps the single most important development in the world of hypermediahas been the steady development of read-write systems-of the kindof systems, in other words, that the pioneering theorists Vannevar Bush andTheodor H. Nelson envisioned. Blogs, wikis, and the Portal Maximizer by ActiveNavigation all represent attempts to bring to the Web the features foundin hypertext software of the 1980s that made readers into authors.