Untitled - witz cultural

32HYPERTEXT 3.0 Writing, probably the most important technology human beings ever developed,exchanges presence and simultaneity for asynchronous communication-forthe opportunity to respond at one's own convenience. Because itdoes not base the act of communication on presence, writing does not requirethe person communicating to be in either the same place or the sametime as the person receiving the communication. The person communicatinginformation places it in a form that permits someone else to receive itlater. Writing, printing, cinema, and video are all forms of asynchronous communication,which, as Mcluhan points out in The Gutenberg Galaxy, permitsreflection, abstraction, and forms of thought impossible in an oral culture.Writing's combination of absence and asynchronisity obviously permits a newkind of education, as well as itself becoming a goal of education, since teachingreading and writing becomes a primary function of early instruction ineras in which these skills are important.For millennia, writing, which eventually leads to silent reading, nonethelessremained a technology that oddly combined orality and literacy. Theexplanation for this situation lies in economic and material factors. Thehigh cost and scarcity of writing surfaces prompted scribes to omit spacesbetween words and adopt a bewildering array of abbreviations, all so theycould cram as many characters as possible on a scroll or page. These materialconditions produced a kind of text that proved so difficult to read that itchiefly served as a mnemonic device, and readers often read aloud. Eventually,around the year 1000, cheaper writing materials led to the developmentof interword spacing, which in turn encouraged silent reading-a practicethat tended to exchange expressive performance and a communal experience for privary, increasing reading speed, and the sense of personal or innerplace. Interword spacing, like the codex (what we generally call a book), eventuallychanged reading from a craft skill to an ordinary one required ofeverycitizen.Since the invention of writing and printing, information technology hasconcentrated on the problem of creating and then disseminating static, unchangingrecords oflanguage. As countless authors since the inception ofwriting have proclaimed, such fixed records conquer time and space, howevertemporarily, for they permit one person to share data with other peoplein other times and places. As Elizabeth Eisenstein argues, printing adds theabsolutely crucial element of multiple copies of the same text; this multiplicity,which preserves a text by dispersing individual copies of it, permits readersseparated in time and space to refer to the same information (116). AsEisenstein, Marshall Mcluhan, William M. Ivins, J. David Bolter, and other