Untitled - witz cultural

330HYPERTEXT 3.0 at the Niemann Foundation at Harvard about the implications of the newtechnology for journalism. I speculated that if we could apply the hypertextparadigm to news, we might have news media in which individual readerscould pursue subjects that interested them as long as they had time andpatience to do so.3 I hardly expected to encounter such a rich example half adozen years later! Let me emphasize how this hypertext version of the newsdiffers from both the television and newspaper ones. To procure the sameinformation I obtained on the web, I would need to expend several days andpossibly weeks using a conveniently located information resource, such as alarge library and I would also have to supplement my search with telephonecalls to various embassies, including those located abroad. Compare this towhat we may term the Aarseth principle-the idea that if two different informationtechnologies contain essentially the same information, no differenceexists between them. As in the searches for information about medications,this hypertextual presentation of news about a current event clearly empowersthe user-if by "empower" we mean, as I do here, "provides informationthat would be difficult if not impossible to obtain otherwise." Again, Aarsethfinds absolutely no difference between information technologies that containthe same information, but to do so he has to ignore the vastly different wayseach one is experienced. Using the words Mitchetl uses to distinguish betweendigital and printed text, I emphasize "that is relevant at the level ofeveryday experience." Whether or not they have a place in Aarseth's theories,the democratization effects of hypermedia and the Internet are relevant at thelevel of everyday experience.The Marginalization ofTechnology and the Mystificationof LiteratureDiscussions of the politics of hypertext have to mention itspower, at least at the present time, to make many critical the-orists' particularly Marxists' very uncomfortable' Alvin Kernanwryly observes, "That the primary modes of productionaffect consciousness and shape the superstructure of cultureis, not since Marx, exactly news, but . . . both Whiggish theoriesof progress and Marxist historical dialectic have failed to satisfy the needto understand the technologically generated changes or to provide much realhelp in deciding what might be useful and meaningfirl responses to such radicalchange" (3). Anyone who encounters the statements of Frederic famesonand other critical theorists about the essential or basic lack of importance oftechnology, particularly information technology, to ideology and thought ingeneral recognizes that these authors conspicuously marginalize technology.As Terry Eagleton's fine discussions of general and literary modes of produc-