Untitled - witz cultural

308HYPERTEXT 3.0 which uses hlpertext linking to allow the reader to travel among lexias relatinghis experiences as a security guard in Tokyo, work with a Zen master, andfapanese poetry. Following directions and clicking on the introduction, oneencounters two possible routes-"water" or "chef"-and following the first,one encounters four lexias that, taken together, produce the following:[1] Water flows, unceasingly.[2] lt never stops. Not for a second.[3] To hear it makes me think that I can hear the sound oftime trickling down like water.[4] Look without your eyes, straight-at all that has life, and simply to obey them.Following the link from this last lexia opens an image of the night sky fromwhich one can take a dozen different paths, some of which cyde ba& throughthe sky. At first, like the lexia entitled "chef," some on this path appear to contrastsharply with the tone and subject of the Zen materials, but increasinglyas one encounters and reencounters them, these supposedly disparate subjectsbegin to interpenetrate and interilluminate one another, drawing closertogether, as it were: the hard-working short-order cook turns out to fulfill theNun Aoyama's injunction "Don't think about yourself" while the words of ahalf-witted co-worker, obsessed with the weather, blend eerilv with those ofhis Zen master.Some mystories, to be sure, may well be fictional through and through;that is, llke Jane Eyre and Great Expectations, they imitate or simulate autobiographies,and however much autobiographical material may permeatethem, they nonetheless take the form of autobiographies of fictional characters.Helene Zumas's Semio-Surf, at which we have already looked when discussingthe rhetoric of writing hypermedia for the World Wide Web, exemplifiessuch a possibly fictional mystory and so do several other workssubmitted as course projects.In contrast, Jeffrey Pack's Growing Up Digerate, which now forms a partor subweb of +he Cyberspace, Virtuql Reality, and Citicql Theory Web, combinestheory here chiefly relating to cyberspace, and autobiography of someonewho grew up "'digitally literate,' that is, having a familiarity with computers."As Pack's "Introduction" points out,Most autobiographies start at birth, or with a short prelude describing how onelparents met. For this web, however, such things aren't very important. A birthdate(February 14,1977) may prove useful ifyou're the sort ofperson who likes to do themath and figure out how old I was when various things happened, but isn't very