Untitled - witz cultural

The Politics ofPa rticu I ar Tech n ologiesDiscussions of hypertext all raise political questions-questionsof power, status, and institutional change. All thesechanges have political contexts and political implications. Considerationsofhypertext, like all considerations ofcritical theoryand literature, have to take into accountwhat fameson terms the basic "recognitionthat there is nothing that is not social and historical-indeed, that everythingis 'in the last analysis'political" (Political IJnconscious,20). A firlly implementedembodiment of a networked hypertext system such as I have describedobviously creates empowered readers, ones who have more power relative bothto the texts they read and to the authors of these texts. The reader-author as studentsimilarly has more power relative to the teacher and the institution. Thispattern of relative empowennent, which we must examine with more care andsome skepticism, appears to support the notion that the logic of informationtechnologies, which tends toward increasing dissemination of knowledge,implies increasing democratization and decentralization of power.Technology always empowers someone. It empowers those who possessit, those who make use of it, and those who have access to it. From the verybeginnings of hypertext (which I locate in Vannevar Bush's proposals for thememex), its advocates have stressed that it grants new power to people. Writerson hypertext almost always continue to associate it with individual freedomand empowerment. 'After all," claim the authors of a study concerningwhat one can learn about learning from the medium, "the essence of hypertextis that users are entirely free to follow links wherever they please" (Mayes,Kibby, and Anderson, 228). Although Bush chiefly considered the memex'sability to assist the researcher or knowledge worker in coping with largeamounts of information, he still conceived the issue in terms of ways toempower individual thinkers in relation to systems of information and decision. The inventors of computer hypertext have explicitly discussed it interms of empowerment of a more general class of reader-authors. DouglasEnglebart, for example, who invented the first actual working hypertext environment, called his system Augment; and Ted Nelson, who sees Xanadu asthe embodiment of the 1960s New Left thought, calls on us to "imagine a newaccessibility and excitement that can unseat the video narcosis that now sitson our land like a fog. Imagine a new libertarian literature with alternativeexplanations so that anyone can choose the pathway or approach that bestsuits him or her; with ideas accessible and interesting to everyone, so that anew richness and freedom can come to the human experience; imagine arebirth of literacy" (Computer Lib, '1.141.7