Untitled - witz cultural

367THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTtional governments from controlling the flow of money and information,thereby inevitably destroying them and transferring their power to other entities,such as multinational corporations and organized crime.The apparently odd collocation ofpolitics and pornography that appearsso explicitly in China and Singapore turns out to be a common theme in theintertwined histories of information technology, democratrzanon, and modernity. In fact, as Lynn Hunt has shown, "pornography as a regulatory categorywas invented as a response to the perceived menace of the democratizationof culture . . . It was only when print culture opened the possibility of themasses gaining access to writing and pictures that pornography began toemerge as a separate genre ofrepresentation" (12-13). Ifone defines pornographyas "explicit depiction ofsexual organs and sexual practices with the aimof arousing sexual feelings," then it almost always appears accompanied by"something else until the middle or end of the eighteenth century. In earlymodern Europe, that is, between 1500 and 1800, pornographywas most oftena vehicle for using the shock ofsex to criticize religious and political authorities"(10), and it was therefore linked "to freethinking and heresy, to scienceand natural philosophy, and to attacks on absolutist political authority" (11).As these examples suggest, the World Wide Web and the Internet bringwith them the threat and promise of democratized access to informationallsorts of information, not all of it savory or sane-but the degree to whichinformation technology will change culture, government, and society verymuch remains an open question. If, as we have observed, the very slightestchanges in technology (the size of a screen, the presence or absence of color,forms of linking) often have surprisingly major effects on the way we read,write, and think in e-space, then one cannot predict if governments willfinally control the forms of hypertext we shall encounter, or if they will appearin forms that will prove too powerful for present conceptions of space, power,and the laws that shape them.Access to the Text and theAuthor's Right (Copyright)Access to a network implies access to texts "on" that network,and this access raises the issue of who has the right to haveaccess to a text-access to read it as well as to link to it. Problemsand possibilities come with the realization that authorshipas it is conventionally understood is a convention. Conceptions ofauthorship relate importantly to whatever information technology currentlyprevails, and when that technology changes or shares its power with another,the cultural constmction of authorship changes, too, for good or for ill.A related problem concerns the fate of authorial rights. Michael Heim