Untitled - witz cultural

35'lTHE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTever before. Few readers cared to locate, much less make an inconvenient,costly, and possibly dangerous trip to peruse an individual manuscript whenrelatively far cheaper printed books existed close at hand. As habits and expectationsof reading changed during the transition from manuscript to print,the experience of reading texts in manuscript changed in several ways. Althoughretaining the aura of unique objects, texts in manuscript appearedscarcer, harder to locate, and more difficult to read in comparison with books.Moreover, as readers quickly accustomed themselves to the clarity and uniformityof printed fonts, they also tended to lose or find annoying certain readingskills associated with manuscripts and certain of their characteristics, includingcopious use of abbreviations that made the copyist's work easier andfaster. Similarly, book readers who had begun to take tables of contents, pagination,and indices for granted found locating information in manuscriptsparticularly difficult. Finally, readers in a culture of print who have enjoyedthe convenience of abundant maps, charts, and pictures soon realized thatthey could not find certain kinds of information in manuscripts at all.In the past, transitions from one dominant information medium to anotherhave taken so long-millenniawith writing and centuries with printing-thatthe surrounding cultures adapted gradually. Those languages anddialects that did not make the transition remained much the same for a longtime but gradually weakened, attenuated, or even died out because they couldnot do many of the things printed languages and dialects could do. Becauseduring the early stages of both chirographic and typographic cultures muchofthe resources was devoted to transferring texts from the earlier to the currentmedium, this masked these transitions somewhat. The first centuriesof printing, as Mcluhan points out, saw the world flooded with versions ofmedieval manuscripts in part because the voracious, efficient printing presscould reproduce texts faster than authors could write them. This flood ofolder work had the effect of thus using radically new means to disseminateold-fashioned, conseryative, and even reactionary texts.We can expect that many of the same phenomena of transition will repeatthemselves, though often in forms presently unexpected and unpredictable.We can count on hypertext and print existing side by side for some time tocome, particularly in elite and scholarly culture, and when the shift to hypertextmakes it culturally dominant, it will appear so natural to the generalreader-author that only specialists will notice the change or react with muchnostalgia for the way things used to be. Whereas certain inventions, such asvacuum cleaners and dishwashers, took almost a century between their initial development and commercial success, recent discoveries and inventions,