Untitled - witz cultural

34HYPERTEXT 3.0 We may state this problem in two ways. First, no one arrangement ofinformation proves convenient for all who need that information. Second,although both linear and hierarchical arrangements provide information insome sort of order, that order does not always match the needs of individualusers of that information. Over the centuries scribes, scholars, publishers,and other makers ofbooks have invented a range ofdevices to increase thespeed of what today are called information processing and retrieval. Manuscriptculture gradually saw the invention ofindividual pages, chapters, paragraphing,and spaces between words. The technology of the book foundenhancement by pagination, indices, and bibliographies. Such devices havemade scholarship possible, if not always easy or convenient to carry out.The next great change in information technology-and that which mostconcerns us-came with the development of digital information technology.For the first time, writing, which had always been a matter of physical markson a physical surface, instead takes the form ofelectronic codes, and this shiftfrom ink to electronic code-what fean Baudrillard calls the shift from the"tactile" to the "digital" (Simulations, 115)-produces an information technologythat combines fixity and flexibility, order and accessibility-but at acost.12 Using Diane Balestri's terminology, we can say that all previous mediatook the form of hard text (cited in Miles, " softvideography"); computing producessoft text, and this fundamental change, like all developments in infotech,comes with gains and losses. For example, although electronic writinghas the multiplicity of print, it does not have the fixity-and hence thereliability and stability-of either written or printed texts.As Bolter and Grushin point out, over the past half century digital computinghas undergone what they call a "process of 'remediatization " duringwhich society understood it as having fundamentally different purposes:r The "programmable digital computer was invented in the 1940s as a calculatingengine (ENIAC, EDSAC, and so on)" (66) for military and scientificapplication.r During the next decade "large corporations and bureaucracies" (66) used it,instead, for accounting.r About the same time, a few pioneers saw the computer as "a new writingtechnology" (66).r Turing and those involved with AI (artificial intelligence) saw the computerprimarily as a "symbol manipulator" that could "remediate earlier technologiesof arbitrary symbol manipulation, such as handwriting and printing" (66).