Untitled - witz cultural

36HYPERTEXT 3.0 that it is "not directly accessible to either the writer or to the reader. The bitsof the text are simply not on a human scale. Electronic technology removes orabstracts the writer and reader from the text. If you hold a magnetic tape oroptical disk up to the light, you will not see text at all . . . In the electronicmedium several layers of sophisticated technology must intervene betweenthe writer or reader and the coded text. There are so many levels of deferralthat the reader or writer is hard put to identify the text at all: is it on the screen,in the transistor memory or on the disk?" (Writing Space,42-43). Furthermore,whereas a printed book has weight and mass, its digital form appearsimmaterial. "Ifyouwantto getpickyaboutthe physics," Mitchell elegantlyexplains,"we can say that the corpus of classical literature is now embodiedelectromagnetically, and, yes, electrons do have mass. But that is irrelevant atthe level of everyday experience. My briefcase quickly gets weighed down if Iload volumes of the Loeb Classical Library into it, but my laptop does not getany heavier if I download the TIG onto its hard drive" (Me++,23Ln.7).The "'virrual' and the 'material,"' Ned Rossiter reminds us, "are alwaysintimately and complexly intertwined" (177), and so emphasizing the virfualityof electronicturt and imogeinno way implies that the actual reading experienceinvolves either a disembodied reader or a nonmaterial presentationof text itself. As N. Katherine Hayles emphasizes, we have to find new ways"to think about embodiment in an age of virfuality" (193).1s We must, for example,come to the absolutely necessary recognition that the physical, materialconditions of computer devices we use affect our experience of virhraltext. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the size of monitors, the change frombitmap to grayscale to color displays, the portability of computers, and ourphysical distance from them make dramatic differences in kinds of texts wecan read and write ("What's a Critic to Dol" and "Connected Images," 82).16Computer text may be virtual, but we who read it are still physical, to read itwe rely on physical devices, and it has effects on the physical world. "Bits justdon't sit out there in cyberspace," Mitchell reminds us, and therefore "itmakes more sense to recognize that invisible, intangible, electromagneticallyencoded information establishes new types of relationships among physicalevents occurring in physical places" (Me+ +, 4).The code-based existence of electronic text that makes it virrual alsomakes it infinitelyvariable. If one changes the code, one changes the text. AsHayles has pointed out, "When a text presents itself as a constantly refreshedimage rather than as a durable inscription, transformations can occur thatwould be unthinkable if matter and energy, rather than informational patterns,formed the primary basis for the systemic exchanges" (30). Further-