Jackie brown

Some notes:

From Text to Hypertext

– Hypertext: a software system allowing extensive cross-referencing between related sections of text and associated graphic material

Writing As Technology

– writing is a technology for collective memory, for preserving and passing on human experience; the art of writing enhances the human capacity for social organisation by providing a culture with fixed laws, with a history, and with a literary tradition

Writing as a state of mind:

– writing is a method for arranging verbal thoughts in a visual space; the writer always needs a surface upon which to make his or her marks and a tool with which to make them, and these materials help to define the nature of the writing

– writing is both natural and artificial; even if the human capacity for language is innate, wired into our genes, we nevertheless use our innate capacity in an artificial, rhetorical way; writing can be taken in and become a habit of mind

Economies of writing:

– each culture has its own economy of writing; there is a dynamic relationship between the materials and the techniques of writing, and a less obvious but no less important relationship between materials and techniques on the one hand and the genres and uses of writing on the other

– no one technology of writing has ever proven adequate for all needs; the economy of writing is always diversified, as secondary technologies occupy places around the dominant one (these secondary technologies may have even been dominant)

Hard and soft structures:

– electronic writing demands another set of skills; such as learning how to structure and locate text in the visual space provided, just as the reader must learn how to make sense of texts in that space

– a writing space is characterised by the interplay of writing materials and writing techniques used; the materials define structural units and relationships that are tangible and hard to alter

– hard structures are tangible qualities of the materials of writing while soft structures are those visually determined units and relationships that are written on or in the hard structures

Electronic structures:

– electronic technology presents writers with a new set of hard structures

– writing in any medium is an act of appropriation; writing pulls words or ideas out of their original time and stores them away for later use

– the electronic link allows us to build and explore trees and networks of elements to turn texts into hypertexts

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