Untitled - witz cultural

44HYPERTEXT 3.0 sion. Interestingly enough, when Baudrillard correctly emphasizes the roleof digitality in the postmodern world, he generally derives his examples ofdigitalization from media that, parficularly at the time he wrote, for the mostpart depended on analogue rather than digital technology-and the differentqualities and implications of each are great. Whereas analogue recording ofsound and visual information requires serial, linear processing, digital technologyremoves the need for sequence by permitting one to go directly to aparticular bit of information. Thus, if one wishes to find a particular passagein a Bach sonata on a tape cassette, one must scan through the cassette sequentially,though modern tape decks permit one to speed the process byskipping from space to space between sections of music. In contrast, if onewishes to locate a passage in digitally recorded music, one can instantly travelto that passage, note it for future reference, and manipulate it in ways impossiblewith analogue technologies-for example, one can instantly replaypassages without having to scroll back through them.In concentrating on nonalphanumeric media, and in apparently confusinganalogue and digital technology, Baudrillard misses the opporrunity toencounter the fact that digitalization also has the potential to prevent, block,and bypass linearity and binarity, which it replaces with multiplicity, truereader activity and activation, and branching through networks. Baudrillardhas described one major thread or constituent of contemporary reality that ispotentially at war with the multilinear, hypertextual one.In addition to hypertext, several aspects of humanities computing derivefrom virruality of text. First of all, the ease of manipulating individual alphanumericsymbols produces simpler word processing. Simple word processingin turn makes vastly easier old-fashioned, traditional scholady editing-thecreation of reliable, supposedly authoritative texts from manuscriptsor published books-at a time when the very notion of such single, unitary,univocal texts may be changing or disappearing.Second, this same ease of cutting, copytng, and otherwise manipulatingtexts permits different forms of scholarly composition, ones in which the researcher'snotes and original data exist in erperientially doser proximity tothe scholarly text than ever before. According to Michael Heim, as electronictextuality frees writing from the constraints of paper-print technology, "vastamounts of information, including further texts, will be accessible immediatelybelow the electronic surface of a piece of writing . . . By connecting asmall computer to a phone, a professional will be able to read'books'whosefootnotes can be expanded into further'books'which in turn open out onto