(e)Text: Error…404 Not Found! Or the Disappearance of History

The possibility of e-texts becoming the dominant medium of delivering information is alarming specifically because it threatens enlightenment values of recording and documenting. The obsession with preserving historical actions, biography and autobiography are complicated by the fluidity of information within e-text. The challenge for e-texters is therefore to ascertain how to re-define what constitutes the making of history. The keeping of records requires radical re-theorising. Indeed, the concept of a ‘record’ might require removing altogether. This process requires evaluating what is historically valuable about texts and questioning what aspects of publishing are important to preserve. From this analysis, neither hyperness nor textness seems sufficient to demonstrate what is profound about the re-construction of text through hypertext. Instead, one might feel a sympathy for Moultrop’s conclusion that, ‘"Hypertext", after all, begins with that nasty four-letter word’ (2000). For Moultrop, there is a strong sense of having been cheated out of knowing what is significant about this electronic world of mult-e-texts. It is suggested here that the focus should be on the manner in which people engage with e-texts, not their being ‘hyper’, but the way in which weaving through and between texts changes an appreciation for knowledge and how it is constructed. There is a context to e-texts that makes the paper onto which the words (e-text) are placed socially significant. If cyberspace is, indeed, a ‘consensual hallucination’ (Gibson, 1984: 51), then it is because it fools users into seeing only the text, hyper or otherwise, when the focus should have been on what is behind the text and between the lines, the (sub)text.

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Andy Miah is an IEET Fellow, a Reader in New Media & Bioethics at the University of the West of Scotland, UK. He is author of Genetically Modified Athletes (2004) and is currently working on The Medicalisation of Cyberspace and CyberSport: Digital Games, Ethics & Cultures' (The MIT Press, 2007).