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

The Book Is Dead Long Live the BookThe book, so post-structuralists critics have 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 trenchant entity, alittle world unto itself wedged between two covers, a piece of discourse that speaks to us witha unified voice, the work of an single(a) author. Instead, as critical discourse by the likes ofBarthes (1979) and Derrida (1974) have informed us, the circumscribe of one book or article atomic number 18inextricably tie in to dozens, compensate hundreds or thousands, of former(a)s, 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 write word gives rise to writing that is a dense andcomplex cheat of references and allusions which lead Barthes in From Work to Text (1979)to characterise individual plant life as networks linked by paths, a web of texts whi ch waseffectively authorless.The liaison 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 veryfew people have actually seen any examples of it. localise simply, hypertext is information (usuallytext, but also graphics, video, and audio clips) that is mediated by a computer, generallydivided into chunks of information connected by computer links. Readers stern work their waythrough texts in a variety of diametrical orders, sometimes following sequences already mapped... ... When Freedom of Choice Fails Ideology and follow out in aSecondary School Hypermedia Project. NAPA publicize 12 (1993) 66-72.Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author. Image, Music, Text. Trans. StephenHeath. New York Hill a nd 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 speculation into Practice. Ed.Ray McAleese. Oxford Intellect Books, 1990 105-125.