Untitled - witz cultural

385NOTES TO PAGESr 25-l 38linking changes the author's conception of his or her power and authority. In fact,the sentence implies a distinction between readers and authors.3. See the final sections of chapter 8 for a discussion of the political implicationsof open hypermedia applications for the Web.4. L6vi-Strauss's obsewation in a note on the same page of The Raw and theCooked (12) that "the Ojibiwa Indians consider mphs as 'conscious beings, withpowers of thought and action"'has some interesting parallels to remarks by pagelson the subject of quasianimate portions of neural nets: "Networks dont quite somuch compute a solution as they settle into it, much as we subjectively experienceour own problem solving . . . There could be subsystems within supersystems-ahierarchy of information and command, resembling nothing so much as humansociety itself. In this image the neuron in the brain is like an individual in society.what we experience as consciousness is the 'social consciousness' of our neuronalnetwork" (126,224).5. L6viStrauss also employs this model for societies as a whole: .,Our sociery, aparlicular instance in a much vaster family of societies, depends, like ali others, forits coherence and its very existence on a network-grownties between consanguineal families,, (Scope of Anthro-complicated among us-ofpology,33).infinitely unstable and6. Said in fact prefaces this remark by the evasive phrase, "it is quite possible toargue," and since he nowhere qualifies the statement that follows, I take it as a claim,no matter how nervous or half-hearted.7. I originally wrote in 1991 that Heim wouid be correct only ,.in some bizarrelyinefrcient dystopic future sense-'future' because today [1991] few people writingwith word processors participate very frequently in the lesser versions of such informationnetworks that already exist, and 'bizarrely inefficient' because one wouldhave to assume that the billions and billions of words we would write would all haveequal ability to clutter the major resource that such networks will be." The reason forHeim s prescience comes, as we shall observe in chapter 8, from the new technologiesof Intemet surveillance, web browser cookies, Google-like search tools, anddata mining.8. An example of the way changes in an author's beliefs weaken the value ofthe author function-the traditional conception of the unitary author-appears inthe works of Thomas carlyle: whereas in The French Revolutionhe clearly accepts thenecessity of violence and sympathizes with lower classes, he became increasinglyreactionary and racist in his later works. In arguing for the unity ofany particularcarlylean text one cannot casually refer to "carlyle" unless one specifies to whichCarlyle one refers.9. According to the scientists that Galegher, Egido, and Kraut studied, people inthese fields work collaboratively not only to share material and intellectual resourcesbut also because "working with another person was simply more fun than workingalone. They also believed that working together increased the quality of*re researchproduct, because of the synthesis of ideas it afforded, the feedback they receivedfrom each other, and the new skiils they learned. In addition to these two major motives,a number of our respondents collaborate primarily to maintain a preestab-