Untitled - witz cultural

350HYPERTEXT 3.0 democratic empowerment depends ultimately on the individual reader-author'saccess to enormous networks ofinformation. As Norman Meyrowitz admits,"Down deep, we all think and believe that hypertext is a vision that sometimesoon there will be an infrastructure, national and international, that supportsa network and community of knowledge linking together myriad types ofinformation for an enornous variety of audiences" (2). The person occupyingthe roles of reader and author musthave access to information, which in practicemeans access to a network-the Internet. For the writer this access becomesessential, for in the hypertextworld access to a network is publication.Considered as an information and publication medium, hypertext presentsin starkest outline the contrast between availability and accessibility.Texts can be available somewhere in an archive, butwithout cataloguing, supportpersonnel, and opportunities to visit that archive, they remain unseenand unread. Since search tools have made materials within a hypertext environmentmuch easier to obtain, it simultaneously threatens to make any ofthose not present seem even more distant and more invisible than absentdocuments in the world of print are felt to be. The political implications ofthis contrast seem clear enough: gaining access to a network permits a text toexist as a text in this new information world. Lyotard, who argues that knowledge"can fit into the new channels, and become operational, only if learningis translated into quantities of information," predicts that "anything in theconstituted body of knowledge that is not translatable in this way will beabandoned and that the direction ofnew research will be dictated by the possibilityof its eventual results being translatable into computer language"(Postmodem Condition,4). Antonio Zampolli, the Italian computationalinguistand past president of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing,warns about this problem when he suggests an analogy between theGutenberg revolution and what he terms lhe infortnatization of langaages:"Languages which have not been involved with printing, have become dialects or have disappeared. The same could happen to languages that have notbeen 'informatized"' (47) transferred to the world of electronic text storage,manipulation, and retrieval. As Lyotard and Zampolli suggest, individualtexts and entire languages that do not transfer to a new information mediumwhen it becomes culturally dominant will become marginalized, unimportant,virh-rally invisible.Although a treatise on poetry, horticulture, or warfare that existed in halfa dozen manuscripts may have continued to exist in the same number ofcopies several centuries after the introduction of printing, it lost power andstatus, except as a unique collector's item, and became far harder to use than