Untitled - witz cultural

340HYPERTEXT 3.0 at "local book fairs and libraries" to teach himself mathematics with little orno outside help (2a5). First with writing, then with print, and now with hypertext,one observes increasing synergy produced when readers widely separatedin space and time build upon one another's ideas.Tom McArthur's history of reference materials provides another reminderthat all developments and inflections of such technology serve the interestsof particular classes or groups. The early-seventeenth-century "compilers ofthe hard-word dictionaries" did not in the manner of modern lexicographersset out to record usage. Instead, they achieved great commercial success by"transferring the word-store of Latin wholesale into their own language . . .They sought (in the spirit of both the Renaissance and Reformation) tobroaden the base of the educated Elect. Their works were for the nonscholarly,for the wives of the gentry and the bourgeoisie, for merchants and artisansand other aspirants to elegance, education, and power" (87). These dictionariessewed, in other words, to diffuse status and power, and the membersof the middle classes who created them for other members of their classesself-consciously followed identifiable political aims.The dictionary created by the French Academy, McArthur reminds us,also embodies a lexicographical program that had clear and immediate politicalimplications. Claude Favre de Vaugelas, the amateur grammarian whodirected the work of the Academy, sought "to regulate the French languagein terms of aristocratic good taste" as a means of making French the "social,political and scientific successor to Latin" (93). This dictionary is one of themost obvious instances of the way print technology sponsors nationalism, thevernacular, and relative democratization. It standardizes the language in waysthat empower parlicular classes and geographical areas, inevitably at the expenseof others. Nonetheless, it also permits the eventual homogenization oflanguage and a corollary, if long-in-coming, possibility of democratization.By the end ofthe eighteenth century Kernan argues, print technologyhad produced many social and political changes that transformed the face ofthe literary world. 'An older system of polite or courtly letters-primarilyoral, aristocratic, amateur, authoritarian, court-centered-was swept away atthis time and gradually replaced by a new print-based, market-centered, democraticliterary system" (4). Furthermore, by changing the standard literaryroles of scholar, teacher, and writer, print "noticeably increased the importanceand the number of critics, editors, bibliographers, and literary historians"at the same time that it increasingly freed writers from patronage andstate censorship. Print simultaneously transformed the audience from a fewreaders of manuscripts to a larger number "who bought books to read in