Untitled - witz cultural

45HYPERTEXT 3.0scholars will continue to rely on books, and one can guess that continuing rmprovementsin desktop publishing and laser printing will produce a lateeffiorescence of the text as a physical object. Nonetheless, these physical textswill be produced (or rather reproduced) from electronic texts, and as readersincreasingly become accustomed to the convenience of electronically linkedtexts, books, which now define the scholar's tools and end-products, willgradually lose their primary role in humanistic scholarship.Books Are Technology, TooWe find ourselves, for the first time in centuries, able to seethe book as unnatural, as a near-miraculous technological innovationand not as something intrinsically and inevitablyhuman. We have, to use Derridean terms, decentered the book. We findourselves in the position, in other words, of perceiving the book as technology.I think it no mere coincidence that it is at precisely this period inhuman history we have acquired crucial intellectual distance from the bookas object and as cultural product. First came distant writing (the telegraph),next came distant hearing (the telephone), which was followed bythe cinema and then the distant seeing of television. It is only with theadded possibilities created by these new information media and computingthat Harold Innis, Marshall Mcluhan, fack Goody, Elizabeth Eisenstein,Alvin Kernan, Roger Chartier, and the European scholars of Lesengeshichtecould arise.Influential as these scholars have been, not all scholars willingly recognizethe power of information technologies on culture. As Geert Lovink, theDutch advocate ofthe sociopolitical possibilities ofthe Internet, has wryly observed,"By and large, [the] humanities have been preoccupied with the impactoftechnology from a quasi-outsider's perspective, as ifsociety and technologycan still be separated" (Dark Fiber, 13). This resistance appears in twocharacteristic reactions to the proposition that information technology constitutesa crucial cultural force. First, one encounters a tendency amongmany humanists contemplating the possibility that information technologyinfluences culture to assume that before now, before computing, our intellectualculture existed in some pastoral nontechnological realm. Technology,in the lexicon of many humanists, generally means "only that technology ofwhich I am frightenedl' In fact, I have frequently heard humanists use theword technology to mean "some intrusive, alien force like computing," as ifpencils, paper, t)?ewriters, and printing presses were in some way natural.Digital technology may be new but technology, particularly information technology,has permeated all known culture since the beginnings of human his-