Untitled - witz cultural

3s8HYPERTEXT 3.0too many contexts produce tragedy, as when she introduces the possibilitythat her father's political views may have played a part in her sister's murder;more often, Suleri produces comedy, or at least a wry glance at her multipleworlds-for example, when discovering that kopura are testicles and notsweetbreads, she find her relationship with her Welsh mother, family, varioushomes, and nationalities become threateningly complex and incoherent.She, like Rushdie, Hume, and so many other postcolonial novelists, createsnarratives "composed of cracks, in-between spaces, gaps where linearity andhomogeneity are rejected in favor of heterogeneity and discontinuity." Likewriters ofhyperfiction, such as fackson and foyce, postcolonial novelists "usestrategies of disruption and discontinuity" in multilinear narratives in which"meaning does not lie in the tracing of one narrative trajectory but rather inthe relationship that various tracings forge with one other." As Sage Wilson,one of the undergraduate contributors to The Postcolonial Web, put it, "postcolonialthought refuses to wipe the slate dean." Past traditions, oral culture,English colonial education, syncretic religions, personal identities are all contaminated,mixed, hybrid, and one has to find ways of depicting-and livingwith-suchcomplexity. Hypertext as paradigm at least offers an effective,understandable means of thinking about this congeries of complex andconflicting issues.The Politics ofAccess: Who CanMake Links, Who Decides Whatls Linked)Mixed with the generally democratic, even anarchic tendenciesof hypertext is another strain that might threaten tocontrol the most basic characteristics of this informationmedium. Readers in informational hypertext obviously havefar more control over the order in which they read individualpassages than do readers ofbooks, and to a large extent thereader's experience also defines the boundaries of the text and even the identityofthe author, ifone can conveniently speak ofsuch a unitary figure inthis kind of dispersed medium.The use of hypertext systems like the Web involves four kinds of accessto text and control over it: reading, linking, writing, and networking. Accessto the hypertext begins with the technology required to read and producehypertext, and this technology has only recently become widely availablein the limited form of blogs. Once it becomes widespread enough to serve asa dominant, or at least major, form of publication, issues of the right andpower to use such technology will be multiplied.One can easily envision reading a text for which one has only partial per-