Untitled - witz cultural

38HYPERTEXT 3.0 tion. Before networked computing, scholarly communication relied chiefly onmoving physical marks on a surface from one place to another with whatevercost in time and money such movement required. Networked electronic communicationso drastically reduces the time scale of moving textual informationthat it produces new forms of textuality. fust as transforming print textto electronic coding radically changed the temporal scale involved in manipulatingtexts, so too has it changed the temporal scale of sharing them. Networkedelectronic communication has both dramatically speeded up scholarlycommunication and created quickly accessible versions of older formsof it, such as online, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, and new forms of it,such as discussion lists, chat groups, blogs, and IRC (Internet Relay Chat)(Landow, "Electronic Conferences," 350). In networked environments usersalso experience electronic text as location independent, since wherever thecomputer storing the text may reside in physical reality, users experience it asbeinghere, on their machines. When one moves the text-as-code, it moves fastenough that it doesn't matter where it "is" because it can be everywhere . . .and nowhere.tT Finally, electronic Iertis net-work-able, always capable of beingjoined in electronic networks. Thus, hypertext and the World Wide Web.Like many features of digital textuality, the sheer speed of obtaining informationhas its good and bad sides. Its advantages include increasingly sophisticatedWorld Wide Web search tools, such as Google, that can provideneeded information nearly instantaneously. For example, as part of the processof writing Hypertert 3.O I wanted to look up some technical terms (RSS,Atom feed) related to blogs. Typing one of these terms into Google, I pressedthe "return" key and received a list of relevant web documents in less than asecond-O.22 second, to be exact; the information I found most usefuloccurred in the first and third listed items. The convenience of such informationretrieval has increasingly led students and faculty to use such searchtools instead ofphysical libraries. Indeed, "'one ofthe rarest things to find isa member of the faculty in the library stacks,"'-so Katie Hafner's article inthe Nep York Times quotes an instructor at a major research university.True, Hafner slightly sensationalizes the use of Google in research by notclarifying the difference between Internet searches and online resources,such as large collections of scholarly journals that originally appeared inprint. Faculty and students devote a good deal of their research time to locatingand reading these scholarly journals, so online versions of them areenormously convenient: one can locate individual articles in a few minutes atmost, multiple users can read them at the same time, and one can obtainthem when the library is closed; some journals are actually more to pleasant