Replacement of the Book with Computers Essay -- Reading Electronic Tex

The Book Is Dead Long Live the BookThe book, so post-structuralists critics have a bun in the oven long been assuring us, just isnt what it used tobeor, to be more accurate, what we used to think it was. Its no longer a discrete entity, a exact world unto itself wedged between two covers, a piece of discuss that speaks to us witha unified voice, the work of an individual author. Instead, as critical discourse by the likes ofBarthes (1979) and Derrida (1974) have informed us, the contents of one book or article arinextricably linked to dozens, even hundreds or thousands, of others, and its contents, in turn,are absorbed by other texts. Texts refer to other texts endlessly our awareness of the laboursPage 2of our predecessors battling with the written word gives rise to writing that is a big(p) andcomplex weave of references and allusions which lead Barthes in From Work to Text (1979)to characterise individual works as networks linked by paths, a web of texts which was effectively authorless.The striking similarities between hypertext and the Text as described by post-structuralist critics accounts, in part, for the magnitude and scope of the hype that hasaccompanied its debut as a workable medium of information. Mention hypertext to a colleague oracquaintance today, and the chances are he or she will certainly have heard of iteven if trulyfew people have actually seen any examples of it. Put simply, hypertext is information (usuallytext, but also graphics, video, and audio clips) that is mediated by a computer, generally carve up into chunks of information connected by computer links. Readers can work their waythrough texts in a variety of different orders, sometimes following sequences already mapped... ... When Freedom of Choice Fails Ideology and Action in aSecondary School Hypermedia Project. NAPA Bulletin 12 (1993) 66-72.Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Image, Music, Text. Trans. StephenHeath. New York agglomerate and Wang, 1977 142-149.____ ______. From Work to Text. Textual Strategies Perspectives in Post-StructuralCriticism. Ed. Josu Harari. Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1979 73-82.Crane, Gregory. Composing Culture The Authority of an Electronic Text. CurrentAnthropology 32.3 (1991) 293-311.Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore JohnsHopkins University Press, 1976.Edward, Deborah M. and Lynda Hardman. Lost in Hyperspace Cognitive Mapping andNavigation in a Hypertext Environment. In Hypertext Theory into Practice. Ed.Ray McAleese. Oxford Intellect Books, 1990 105-125.