Untitled - witz cultural

NotesChapter l. Hypertext1. An important caveat: here, right at the beginnin g,leI me assure my readersthat although I demonstrate that Barthes and Derrida relate in interesting and importantways to computer hypertext, I do not take them-orsemiotics, poststructuralism,or, for that matter, structuralism-tobe essentially the same.2. In fact, some of the most exciting student proiects and published examples ofhypermedia take the form of testing, applylng, or critiquing specific points of theory,including notions of the author, text, and multivocality. Cicero Ignacio da Siiva's PlaloOnJine: Nothing, Science and.Technology QAA3-4) exemplifies a particularly carnivalesque,rambunctious experiment with conventional attitudes toward authorship andits relation to conceptions of a work. The Brazilian scholar explains in Plato On-line,which has no pagination, that "in order to test my hlpothesis that there is no workwithout a 'signature,' and there is no 'safe' means to authenticate the signature of atext and in a text on the internet," he created "hundreds" ofwebsites for fictional researchinstitutes, scientific journals, and survey centers "hosted by free-of-chargeproviders (geocities, tripod, among others)" upon which he placed computer"generated texts created by a combination of "PERL and fava Script programming"from "fragments of text from the internet." Each text is signed with 'Algorithm[author's name]," such as ?lgorithm Giles Deleuze," and the resultant text is "purposefullyunstructured and rarely makes any sense." A11 the texts he keeps on theInternet appear in Portuguese, which Babelfish then translates into English, French,German, and )apanese. FinaLly, Plato On-linernakesthe element of spoof quite clearwhen it announces that it is "a serious journal interested only in publishing textswritten by electric generators. This magazine does not have the intention to publishanlthing that makes sense . . . The names of the authors are not true and all thenames are not from authors who exist [but from] programmed algorithms."Nonetheless, da Silva has discovered that readers persist in submitting "articles,reviews on articles, and comments on the texts, etc." Moreover, despite the fact that