Untitled - witz cultural

328HYPERTEXT3.0We both agree, following Foucault, that authorship "is a social category andnot a technological one" (172)-the point, after all, of much of my chapter 4-and I claim that different forms of information technology plus their socialand political contexts have produced different notions ofauthorship.Perhaps our fundamental points of disagreement appearwhen he assertsthat "there is no evidence that the electronic and printed texts have clearlydivergent attributes" (70) while also denying that hypermedia in any wayempowers anyone or could tend toward democratization. Here in responseare three real-life examples of the ways hypertext and the Internet empowerusers by democratizing access to information. Note that I do not claim thatany of these examples shows that the Internet and associated technologies bythemselves produce political democracy. I also do not claim that they in anyway make the reader of Internet materials an author of them. In the first case,a young man encounters some pills that resemble an antihistamine for whichhe has a prescription, but he cannot definitely identify them for he no longerhas on hand the bottle in which they came. Each pill, however, has three numbersimpressed in the surface, so he types just the three numbers into Google,a popular Web search tool, and the first hit brings one to a pharmaceuticalmanufacturer's site for a drug, which identifies it as a very different medication-anantibiotic, in fact-and he does not take the wrong medication.Even if one hada Physicians Desk Reference (PDR) at hand, one could not searchby number but would have to compare the pill to images of various medications.In a similar situation involving unidentified medications for elderlypeople, consulting a pharmacist did not help, since the pharmacist claimedthe PDR contained so many pills, he did not have the time to try to identifyany. In other words, information one would have to expend many hours oreven days to acquire was located on the Web in less than fifteen seconds.This user's experience, I submit, provides clear answers to two questions.First, does the Internet democratize information and empower usersl Ibelieve the obvious answer is, yes, for as this example demonstrates, digitalinformation technology provides to people other than physicians and pharmacistsinformation when they need it. In fact, anyone with a computer connectedto the Internet, even if located far from a hospital, physicians office,or medical library has access to the needed information. Second, does thequality-in this case, chiefly time-needed to access information prove animportant enough factor to distinguish media from one anotherl Again, Iwould say, yes, for even though the same information (the identity of the pill)is available in both print and digital media, the vastly different experience of