Untitled - witz cultural

62HYPERTEXT 3.0from which it grows and which it overspills," they describe something thathas much in common with the kind of quasi-anarchic networked hypertextone encounters on the World Wide Web, but when the following sentenceadds that the rhizome "is composed not of units but of dimensions, or ratherdirections in motion" (21), the parallel seems harder to complete. The rhizome is essentially a counterparadigm, not something realizable in any timeor culture, but it can serve as an ideal for hypertext, and hypertext, at least Nelsonian,ideal hypertext, approaches it as much as can any human creation.The Nonlinear Model ofthe Network in CurrentCritical TheoryDiscussions and designs of hypertext share with contemporarycritical theory an emphasis on the model or paradigmof the network. At least four meanings of network appear indescriptions of actual hypertext systems and plans for futureones. First, individual printworks when transferred to hypertexttake the form ofblocks, nodes, or lexias joined by a networkof links and paths. Network, in this sense, refers to one kind of electronicallylinked electronic equivalent to a printed text. Second, any gatheringof lexias, whether assembled by the original author of the verbal text, or bysomeone else gathering together texts created by multiple authors, also takesthe form of a network; thus document sets, whose shifting borders makethem in some senses the hypertexh,ral equivalent of a work, are called insome present systems a web.Third, the term network also refers to an electronic system involving additionalcomputers as well as cables or wire connections that permit individualmachines, workstations, and reading-and-writing sites to share information.These networks can take the form of contemporary Local Area Networks(LANs), such as Ethernet, that join sets of machines within an institution ora part of one, such as a department or administrative unit. Networks also takethe form of Wide Area Networks (WANs) that join multiple organizations inwidely separated geographicalocations. Early versions of such wide-area nationaland international networks include JANET (in the United Kingdom),ARPANET (in the United States), the proposed National Research and EducationNetwork (NREN), and BITNET, which linked universities, researchcenters, and laboratories in North America, Europe, Israel, and |apan.a Suchnetworks, which until the arrival of the World Wide Web had been usedchiefly for electronic mail and transfer of individual files, have also supportedinternational electronic bulletin boards, such as Humanist. More powerfirlnetworks that transfer large quantities of information at great speed werenecessary before such networks could fully support hypertext.