Untitled - witz cultural

35AN lNrRoDUcloN r "In the 1970s, the firstword. processors appeared, and in the 1980s the desktopcomputer. The computer could then become a medium because it couldenter into the social and economic fabric of business culture and remediatethe typewriter almost out of existence" (66).r More recently, the computer has been seen as an image capturer, presenter,and manipulator: "lf even ten years ago we thought of computers exclusivelyas numerical engines and word processors, we now think of them also as devicesfor generating images, reworking photographs, holding videoconferences,and providing animation and special effects for film and television" (23).This fundamental shift from tactile to digital, physical to code, and hard tosoft media produces text with distinctive qualities. First of all, since electronictext processing is a matter of manipulating computer codes, all textsthat the reader-writer encounters on the screen are virhral texts. Using ananalogy to optics, computer scientists speak of "virtual machines" created byan operattng system that provides individual users with the experience ofworking on their own individual machines when they in fact share a systemwith as many as several hundred others.13 According to the Oxford. EnglishDictionary, "virhral" is that which "is so in essence or ffia, although not formallyor actually; admitting of being called by the name so far as the effect orresult is concerned," and this definition apparently derives from the use ofthe term in optics, where it refers to "the apparent focus or image resultingfrom the effect of reflection or refraction upon rays of lightJ' In computing,the virrual refers to something thatis "not physically existing as suchbut madeby software to appear to do so from the point ofview ofthe program or the user"(emphasis added). As Marie-Laure Ryan points out, the powerfi.rl concept ofvirtr-ralizafion "leads from the here and now, the singular, the usable once-forall,and the solidly embodied to the timeless, abstract, general, multiple, versatile,repeatable, ubiquitous, and morphologically fluid" 1177.'oSimilarly, all texts the reader and the writer encounter on a computerscreen exist as a version created specifically for them while an electronic primaryversion resides in the computer's memory. One therefore works on anelectronic copy until such time as both versions converge when the writercommands the computer to "save" one's version of the text by placing it inmemory. Atthis pointthe texton screen and in the computer's memorybrieflycoincide, but the reader always encounters a virtual image of the stored textand not the original version itself; in fact, in descriptions ofelectronic wordprocessing, such terms and such distinctions do not make much sense.As Bolter explains, the most "unusual feature" of electronic writing is