A paper submitted to the conference:
Semiotics as a Bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences
Victoria College
University of Toronto
November 2-5, 1995
Karl Marx's analysis seems to apply to the age of information. There is no production without consumption. The product of writing issues forth from the "infinite sea of the already written" (Barthes, 1970). A short essay may be the product of a lifetime of reading, listening and observing. A scholarly article can reflect weeks of archival research, digesting information, testing ideas from other texts, in other contexts, to support an "original" thesis. Writing involves consumption of text and the expenditure of labor. In the act of writing, the author objectifies herself.
There is a parallel phenomenon, "consumption is immediately production," (Marx, p90). In Nature, the consumption of the soil's elements produces a plant. "By taking food, the human being produces his own body" (p90). In the digestion process, an object is decomposed to its lowest elements. The body discharges what it cannot appropriate and attaches the remainder to existing physical structures. In consumption, the object is deconstructed, then personified (p91). We are what we eat. More precisely, what we eat and appropriate becomes us.
Consumption of knowledge is equally productive. Consumption of text necessarily involves decomposition (Ulmer, 1985, p57) and reconstruction. What is not tested by the reader, what is not thrown into fresh combinations of thought becomes inert (Whitehead, 1929, p1). In the construction of meaning, the reader deconstructs information, appropriating only that which combines with existing cognitive structures (Jonassen, Beissner, & Yacci, 1993, p.4). In consumption of text, the object is deconstructed, then appropriated and personified. We are what we read. More precisely, what we read and appropriate becomes us.
Speech and text are the linguistic artifacts of culture. They are extensions of the species (McLuhan, 1964) which evolve and influence the evolution of the species. Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky singled out the presence of language, as the structurally and genetically central feature of productive labor (Davidov and Radzikhovskii, 1985). The artifacts produced by language are the means of production which human kind uses to sustain, shape, and recreate its existence.
Literacy is a new technology, having been with us for only five thousand years. An elaborate encoding scheme introduces a level of abstraction in written text which separates the knower from the known (Ong, 1986, p.38). Literacy entails formal technical skills beyond orality. For most of five thousand years, this was the exclusive realm of priests and princes. Not bound (like speech) to the present and the immediate, writing augments long-term memory, spanning time and distance. It is not a mere coincidence that the great religions of the present era all took root early in the age of literacy. Writing bestows upon the word the immortality of the Word. The written word introduced stability and permanence of language. Literacy gave birth to History. The technology of literacy enabled humanism and the accumulations of archived knowledge. Papyrus and sheepskin manuscripts were fragile and volatile and those who controlled access to a scroll were highly protective of its use. This gave the text a mystical quality, exalting its contents and its author. The reader consumed the text out of a sense of privilege and awe. Important texts were copied by scribes - not to disseminate the text, but to compensate for the fragile, temporal nature of the substrate.
Printing extended literacy beyond the cloisters and ushered in the Modern Age. Gutenberg's invention enabled broad dissemination of written discourse. Knowledge became an instrument of power in the hands of a new emerging class. It enabled the likes of Luther to challenge priestly authority. It provided a forum for the bourgeoisie to rationalize its own ascendancy. Gutenberg's invention spawned new applications for writing: newspapers, pamphlets and posters. The printed word became the primary means for the propagation of ideas and ideologies. Western liberalism was articulated in printed text with analyses of self-evident truths, truths that were derived from mythical states of Nature, truths articulated in the rhetoric of universal freedoms. Among these was freedom of the press, a freedom which had significant meaning for those who owned the presses (Bagdikian, 1983).
It requires capital and considerable labor to convert a manuscript into a book. But the market value of a book is not a function of its paper, typesetting, ink, and binding. It is the ideas and unique expressions of the author. When liberalism established freedom of the press, it extended the tangible rights of property to the intangible. Copyright laws were established early in liberal governments, transforming words and ideas into a commodity that can be owned, controlled, bought, and sold. However, authors rarely own the copyrights to their own work. These are owned by publishers who provide the capital and infrastructure necessary for broad dissemination of the work. In some cases a stipend is granted to the author, in many cases not. But apart from the stipend, the publisher who prints a manuscript bestows status upon that writing as a work of value. The writer is benighted with the title, "author", bestowing the mystical air of "authority".
Fifty years ago technicians at the University of Pennsylvania were harnessing cables and inserting vacuum tubes into the world's first digital computer. Eniac filled the space of a large university laboratory and it consumed the power of a locomotive (Joe, 1995). The first computer had as much memory as today's inexpensive calculators, and its functional capabilities were not much greater. The memory for the early computer was a rotating drum with metallic strips at its surface. This device could store about five kilobytes of data, etched in magnetic domains along the metal strips - enough storage for about a page and a half of text. (Gray, 1992)
Five decades later, computer storage is measured in megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes and petabytes. One megabyte is the equivalent of 300 pages of text, the size of an average book. Today's common desktop computer can store the equivalent of about one hundred books. It can retrieve any page within milliseconds. If the disk becomes full, data can be archived to an off-line device using magnetic tape. Current technology such as StorageTek's Redwood, can store fifty gigabytes of data in a small tape cartridge. That is the equivalent of fifty thousand 300-page books on a single, compact reel of tape.
Place six thousand such tapes in a Powderhorn library and you have the equivalent of three hundred million books in one storage module eight feet high and twelve feet in diameter. Any book in this library can be retrieved and transferred to online storage in less than one minute. The total cost of the library amounts to less than one penny per book.
One problem with centralized storage is the provision of multiple access. How can thousands of users access data from a single machine? The solution is to distribute the data. There is no reason that I cannot keep the fifty or so books I use the most on my local disk drive. My department might invest in a central disk server which can store three or four thousand books online (a cost of fifty cents each). Access is instantaneous for anyone in the department. Using a local area network, resources can be shared between departments. Using the Internet, resources can be shared between universities, between research libraries, between businesses, between nations!
In 1994, the world-wide computer industry sold nearly one petabyte of data storage capacity (the storage equivalent of nine hundred million books). That number will have tippled by the end of 1995. The world market projection for the year 2000 is 140 petabytes and the accumulated digital storage capacity will total 500 petabytes (Williams, 1995). When we pass into the new century, it will be technically feasible to place the world's archives at our fingertips. Within seconds, anyone with a terminal or PC will be able to access any lexia from the entire store of human knowledge!
Technical feasibility, however, does not imply social readiness. There are a few social, economic and political barriers that preclude this ideal for the near term. One issue is the matter of "intellectual property": Who owns the information in the present archive? Am I willing to share my knowledge with the rest of humanity? The other issue is a matter logistics: who will invest the effort to transfer the existing paper archive to electronic format?
Copyright law can adjust, albeit slowly, as technology challenges the existing and accepted interpretations of property rights. Digitization and communications technology are imposing a different paradigm into the relationship between the author, the text, the publisher and the reader. The capital, labor and publishing overhead that goes into the distribution of a book are not required in the dissemination of electronic text. The concept of "intellectual property" and investment protection are under current revision in the wake of the new technology. (see Lehman, 1994, Oakley, 1990)
The question of who will digitize the existing paper archive should be taken care of in the natural order of things. Much of that work is already underway. In the sciences, it is the new information that is critical, requiring immediate dissemination. Electronic format lends itself to such contexts and a preponderance of scientific data finds its way directly to the digital medium. In the arts and humanities, ancient archives are slowly making the transition to electronic domains. Project Gutenberg is a distributed effort of volunteers committed to the task of digitizing literary classics, making them freely available over the Internet. The goal of Project Gutenberg is to have ten thousand books online and available by 2001. The Brittle Books Program (CNI, 1994) involves a coalition of librarians and scholars whose work involves the use of primary source materials in the humanities. Their aim is to preserve three million fragile books, manuscripts and serials in digital format within the next 20 years. Similar projects of digitization are being initiated by many universities around the world. These include
We may never see the complete migration from library stacks to computer archives. However, considering the current proliferation of active internet use, it is not unrealistic to anticipate a critical mass of online information within the next decade. Online resources will grow and flourish to the extent that they are "consumed" by the insatiable human apatite for knowledge. And the primary artifact of that knowledge will no longer resemble the fixed format of linear text known as the book. In the words of Edward M. Jennings (1992), "The text is dead; long live the techst."
A foretelling article appeared in the Atlantic Monthly fifty years ago this past summer. The director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development called attention to the enormous proliferation of scientific information at the close of World War II. Vannevar Bush (1945) exclaimed that "publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." Dr. Bush's concern was not the abundance of information, but the antiquated technology that was then available to access the information. Bush proposed a new technology, one that would allow us to manipulate text in a manner "as we may think". His object-oriented, associative model for text was called memex. The body of the text was composed, not hierarchically, but in a cross-linked, web-like structure. Text objects might be called from a central index, but they could also be recalled from within other lexias, just as one thought might invoke another.
Thirty years later, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext to describe the interlinking character of this web structure. Nelson (1974) extended the memex model to a theoretical model containing all the libraries in the world. Nelson envisioned tools that could extract specific information with ease, making it possible to dip into any text at any point using search algorithms and cross-reference links. Today, with the cross linking capabilities of the Internet, Ted Nelson's vision is becoming reality.
Hypertext reference catalogs do not retrieve a call number of a book. They retrieve the actual text. Once retrieved, the text can be searched, using keywords, taking the reader to the exact paragraph of her inquiry. Footnotes and reference citations are replaced by hyperlinks to external texts. Selecting the hyperlink will retrieve and display the precise paragraph that was referenced. A citation index of corollary sources can be displayed upon command, showing a list of all other texts which make reference to the text at hand. Any of the corollary texts can be selected instantly upon command. An unfamiliar word can be selected for an instant query submitted to an online unabridged dictionary. The same word might be submitted to a search engine that can retrieve a list of other texts which can elaborate on the word. When Nelson proposed these capabilities, the concept was science fiction. Today it is reality.
Hypertext embodies Peirce's notion of unlimited semiosis, a texture of signs which give rise to interpretants, which point to other signs which point to interpretants in an infinite series (Eco, 1976, p.69). It is a thread that cannot belong to any single author. Elements in an electronic writing are dynamic, fluid, even chaotic. They are in a perpetual state of reorganization - not by the writer, but by the reader! Hypertext embodies Roland Barthes' notion of the ideal writerly text, "a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach; they are indeterminable." (Barthes, 1970)
Once I place written text online for public access, I relinquish control over that text: how it is structured, how it is prefaced, how it ends, in which contexts it may find itself. The value-added dimension of hypertext is the ability to link any piece of information from any context to any other context. The original work and its authorship are rendered inconsequential. The roles of reader and author are drastically changing in this electronic age. Authors who find discomfort here will undoubtedly cling to the print medium where authority, control and ownership are well established.
Scholarly writing can be considered as "collaborative writing", since the writer draws heavily from the work of others in the process of constructing original work. Within hypertext environments, all writing becomes collaborative writing (Landow, 1992, p88). The author who is writing now acknowledges the presence of other texts and other authors within a virtual presence of collaboration. Landow observes that most of our intellectual endeavors involve collaboration, but the rules of our proprietary intellectual culture hinder full recognition of other's contributions (p90). This culture will undoubtedly change as the new technology redefines the relationships between author, collaborator, publisher, text and reader.
The postmodern phenomenon of the Internet offers unrestrained access to information and opportunities for free expression to levels unprecedented in modern democracy. Traditionally, freedom of the press did not extend to the common person. On the Internet, there is no media monopoly determining the flow of information. A work of writing need not be barred from publication by self-appointed censors. While there are online peer-reviewed journals, and there are network environments which entail censorship in the interest of "quality control", the Internet itself is delightfully out of control (Kelly, 1994). On the Internet, each reader is her own editor, each author his own publisher.
This removes a formal barrier between writing and publishing that traditionally restricts creative thoughts from public view. A page of writing need not grow into a full article or a book before it becomes public. By exteriorizing memory, we convert knowledge from the possession of one to the possession of more than one (Landow, 1992 p.174). By detaching writing from the notion of self-identified property, we can return literacy to the more native, human-inclusive realm of orality.
But for many adults, the idea of presenting unfinished work to the public is disturbing. They are compelled to withhold "publication" of their work until it is in a finished form. As we observe online contributions on the Web, we see constant changes, revisions, and updates to homepage documents. This is true even for the most established Web pages (e.g. CERN). The desire to bar public access to works under development may be a vestige of a previous publishing paradigm. As users become more familiar with the "under construction" status of most online resources, the sharing of in-process work may be another trait that returns writing to the spontaneity of an oral culture.
THE ROLE OF THE READER
There are those who condemn the Internet for the same reasons that we
have praised it: the unrestrained freedom; the lack of quality control; the
absence of structure, the lack of centeredness; the proliferation of
ill-composed, unfinished writing. Open hypertext has no preface, no page-one,
no conclusion, and the body is boundless. There are no rules, no
controls. It is anarchy.
In a previous, more authoritarian era, the lecturer/author would guide the pupil in his every action, prescribing the ends for him and offering the means to attain them (Eco, 1979, p52). The learner showed mastery by demonstrating the ability to regurgitate the words of the master. In the modern age of text, agency and control was at the center. But in the postmodern age of cyberspace, control moves to periphery. Decentered hypertext forces the learner to assume ownership. It is the reader, not the author, who will be the grounding center of human knowledge.
In the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico suggested that the social world is more intelligible than the natural world because of its human origins. For Vico, humans are meaning-seeking organisms, and where they find no meaning, they end up making it (Danesi, 1995). Despite its undergirding of high technology, the World Wide Web is a human structure. It is a socio-cultural artifact of multiple, mind-constructed realities. It is a complex structure, but it is essentially human, and it immediately reveals its secrets to those who make intentional inquiry and who extract meaning from signs they encounter along their travels.
Logic is required to make skillful use of the World Wide Web - not inductive or deductive logic, but abductive logic. Philosopher Peirce, (1902) coined the term abduction to describe the nature of inquiry. It is the craft of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes or Eco's Brother William. Abduction does not lead to immediate conclusions, but it advances our understanding and allows us to move the inquiry forward. Signs are not data that can be neatly dismissed as true or false; instead, they provide hints and illuminate circumstances (see Shank, 1993). Abduction extracts meaning from ambiguous or indeterminate fields of data. The logic of signs is abductive logic.
Browsers of the Internet are hunters and gatherers of information. The term browsing carries overtones of leisure and aimlessness. The sheer volume of information on the Internet is so great that browsing a sea of text would be unproductive. But abductive browsing is intentional, focused and directed. Skilled browsing includes the use of tools (e.g. search engines bookmark files, and information filters) and human resources (peer discussion groups and special interest groups).
The assumptions we make and the instruments we use will shape the information we perceive. In online environments, the information we encounter is fluid and constantly changing. For the postmodernist there is no canon. The truth of a work changes with each reading. In writing space, according to Bolter (1990), "the reader calls forth her own text out of the network, and each such text belongs to one reader and one particular act of reading."
Kevin Kelly (1994, p466) observes that there is "no central keeper of knowledge in a network, only curators of particular views." People in a highly connected and deeply fragmented world can no longer look to a central canon for direction. Each of us has a piece of the puzzle, but no one seems to have the whole picture. A set of rules or policy guidebook for the postmodern will not be found. In Kelly's words, "Distributed, headless, emergent wholeness becomes the social ideal."
By connecting one's own knowledge representations to varied and distant resources, that act of consumption produces knowledge, extending an element of order where there was chaos. When I connect my thoughts to the ideas that you have represented, an element of understanding emerges between us. As others link their own texts to the nodes that we have produced, a three-dimensional holographic picture begins to emerge. Like the jewels woven together in the mythical net of Indra, each gem reflects the image of all the others.
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