Untitled - witz cultural

339THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTidly become classes or castes, and greatly increased the power and prestige ofthe lettered. In the millennia that it took for writing to difuse through largeproportions of entire societies, however, writing shifted the balance from thestate to the individual, from the nobility to the polis.Writing, like other technologies, possesses a logic, but it can producedifferent, even contrary effects in various social, political, and economic contexts.Marshall Mcluhan points to its multiple, often opposing effects whenhe remarked that "if rigorous centralism is a main feature of literacy andprint, no less so is the eager assertion of individual rights" (GwtenbergGalaxy,220). Historians have long recognized the contradictory roles played by printin the Reformation and in the savage religious wars that followed. "In view ofthe carnage which ensued," Elizabeth Eisenstein observes, "it is difficult toimagine how anyone could regard the more efficient duplication of religioustexts as an unmixed blessing. Heralded on all sides as a 'peaceful art,' Gutenberg'sinvention probably contributed more to destroying Christian concordand inflaming religious warfare than any of the so-called arts ofwar ever did"(319).8 One reason for these conflicts, Eisenstein suggests, lies in the fact thatwhen fixed in print-putdown, that is, in black and white, "positions oncetaken were more difficult to reverse. Battles of books prolonged polarization,and pamphlet wars quickened the process" (326).I contend that the history of information technology from writing to hypertextreveals an increasing democratization or dissemination of power.Writing begins this process, for by exteriorizing memory it converts knowledgefrom possession of one to the possession of more than one. As Ryancorrectly argues, "writing can belong to anyone; it puts an end to the ownershipor self-identical property that speech signaled" (Marxism and Deconstruction,29).The democratic thrust of information technologies derivesfrom their diffusing information and the power that such diffirsion can produce.eSuch empowerment has always marked applications of new informationtechnology to education. As Eisenstein points out, for example, Renaissancetreatises, such as those for music, radically reconfigured the culturalconstruction of learning by freeing the reader from a subordinate relation toa particular person: "The chance to master new skills without undergoing aformal apprenticeship or schooling also encouraged a new sense of independenceon the part of manywho became self-taught. Even though the newso-called'silent instructors' did no more than duplicate lessons already beingtaught in classrooms and shops, they did cut the bonds of subordinationwhich kept pupils and apprentices under the tutelage of a given master" (244\.Eisenstein cites Newton as an examDle of someone who used books obtained