Untitled - witz cultural

362HYPERTEXT 3.0 such as the laser, have required less than a tenth the time to complete thesame process. This acceleration ofthe dispersal oftechnological change suggests,therefore, that the transition from print to electronic hypertext, if itcomes, will therefore take far less time than did earlier transitions.The history of the print technology and culture aiso suggests that as theWeb becomes even more culturally important than it already is, it will do soby enabling large numbers of people either to do new things or to do oldthings more easily. Furthermore, such a shift in information paradigms willsee another version of what took place in the transition to print culture: anoverwhelming percentage of the new texts created, like Renaissance and laterhow-to-do-it books, will answer the needs of an audience outside the academyand hence will long remain culturally invisible and objects of scorn, particularlyamong those segments of the cultural elite who claim to know the trueneeds of "the peoplel' The enormous number of online diaries, political andother parodies, examples of self-published fiction and poetry', and conversiontalesby people with alternative lifestyles reveals that for many such a changehas already taken place. The active readers hypertext creates can meet theirneeds only if they can find the information they want, and to find that informationthey must have access to the Internet and local text- and databasesthat require special access. Similarly, authors cannot fully assume the authorialfunction if they cannot place their texts on a network, something at firstimpossible on the World Wide Web unless the author had access rights to asewer. Blogs with comment functions, as we have observed, allow the Webreader to act as a Web author, too.lsSlashdot: The Reader as Writerand Editorin a Multiuserwebloe -Sloshdot, the famous multiuser site that uploaded almost13,000 blogs in2003, represents an important experiment inonline democracy and large-scale collaboration because ituses its readers to moderate submissions. Ron "CmdrTaco"Malda, one of its founders and editor-in-chief, explains how the editors graduallydevised a system to screen readers'contributions. The site grew rapidly,the number of comments increased, and "many users discovered new andannoying ways to abuse the system. The authors had but one option: Deleteannoying comments. But as the system grew we knew that we would neverbe able to keep up. We were outnumbered." At first Malda invited a few peopleto help, but the number soon increased to 25, and when they no longer couldhandle the thousands of posts that arrived every day, "we picked more theonlywaywe could. Using the actions ofthe original 25 moderators, we picked400 more. We picked the 400 people who had posted good comments: com-