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Arborescent Systems: (from Guattari and Deleuze's A Thousand Plaueaus)
" . . . are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories." (16)
"The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective interiority (the strata of the book). the book imitates the world, as art imitates nature: by procedures specific to it that accomplish what nature cannot or can no longer do. The law of the book is the law of reflection, the One that becomes two. . . . Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree." (5)
Cyberspace: "In the mid-80s, William Gibson first identified the emergence of cyberspace as the most recent moment in the development of electromechanical communications, telematics and virtual reality. Cyberspace, as Gibson saw it, is the simultaneous experience of time, space, and the flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data:
All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn't, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry.
The "electronic" world as perceived on a computer screen, the
term is often used in opposition to the "real" world. With Web-extensions
like VRML and the Cyberspace Protocol, Virtual Reality will one day come
to your home computer." (excerpt from Donald
Theall)
"With the advance of computers and online networks, especially the internet, a new dimension of human experience is rapidly opening up. The term "cyberspace" has been mentioned so often that it may at this point seem trite. However, the experience created by computers and computer networks can in many ways be understood as a psychological "space." When they power up their computers, launch a program, write email, or logon to their online service, users often feel - consciously or subconsciously - that they are entering a "place" or "space" that is filled with a wide array of meanings and purposes. Many users who have telneted to a remote computer or explored World Wide Web will describe the experience as "traveling" or "going someplace." Spatial metaphors - such as "worlds," "domains," or "rooms" are common in articulating online activities. On an even more basic psychological level, users often describe how their computer is an extension of their mind and personality, a "space" that reflects their tastes, attitudes, and interests. In psychoanalytic terms, computers and cyberspace become a type of "transitional space" that is an extension of the individual's intrapsychic world." (excerpt from John Suler, Ph.D. - Rider University)
Electronic literacies: "the knowledge and skill required to make marks in an electronic age with electronic devices. Such knowledge and skill generally includes alphabetic literacies as well as at least rudimentary grasp of a computer's interface and some specialized knowledge for issuing computer-readable commands to save a document, print it, send it out over a network and the like." (excerpt from Nancy Kaplan)
FTP : (file transfer protocol)
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
Hypermedia: an extension of hypertext. "Think of hypermedia as a collection of elastic messages that can stretch and shrink in accordances with the readers' actions. Ideas can be opened up and analyzed at multiple levels of detail. The best paper equivalent I can think of is an Advent calendar. But when you open the little electronic (versus paper) doors, you may see a different story line depending on the situation or, like barbershop mirrors, an image within an image within an image." It is important to think of hypermedia as more than a private world's fair of information, mixing fixed chunks of video, audio, and data. Translating freely from one to the other is really where the field of hypermedia/multimedia is headed.
Hypertexts: "multiple structurations within a textual domain. Imagine a story . . . that changes each time one reads it. Such a document consists of chunks of textual material (words, video clips, sound segments or the like), and sets of connections leading from one chunk or node to other chunks. The resulting structures offer readers multiple trajectories through the textual domain. Each choice of direction readers make in their encounter with the emerging text, in effect, produces that text. The existing examples of this form . . . so densely linked, offer so many permutations of the text, that the ‘authors' cannot know in advance or control with any degree of certainty what ‘version' of the story readers will construct as they proceed." (excerpt from Nancy Kaplan)
Timelines:
Links to other hypertext definitions
Information Literacy: "Information literacy is the ability to identify what information is needed and the ability to locate, evaluate, and use information in solving problems and composing discourse. It encompasses a set of competencies that will provide for survival and success in an information technology environment. The Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) report identifies information literacy as one of five essential skills that the workplace will demand of employees of the future. Teaching information literacy involves communicating the power and scope of information as well as explaining how information is organized, how it is retrieved through a variety of access sources and tools, and how to evaluate, organize, and apply information to a variety of problems and situations." (excerpt from Information Literacy)
Listservs: "The Internet provides thousands of discussion groups via e-mail by allowing users to place themselves on electronic mailing lists.
A listserv is program that maintains one or more of these mailing lists (i.e., a list server). A listserv automatically distributes an e-mail message from one member of a list to all other members on that list. Listservs maintain thousands of lists in the form of digests, electronic journals, discussion groups and the like.
When you subscribe to a list, your name and e-mail address is automatically
added to the list. You will receive a standard letter of welcome (via e-mail)
telling you about the list. From that time on, you will receive all mail
(postings) sent to the list by its members. You may follow the discussions
or join in on them. If you respond, you can send your response to the list
(in which case, all members of the list will receive it), or to an individual
on the list. You can signoff (unsubscribe) from a list at any time. You
can also get a listing of all the members of a list and their e-mail addresses."
(excerpt from E-Mail
Discussion Groups)
The following sites index listservs:
Literacies: "a set of technologies and social practices enabling the mental, the oral, and the gestural to be detached from the human mind and/or body, to be represented externally, to be stored, to be retrieved, and to be construed. Any act of semiosis that can be recorded outside of a human body and that can be recalled or conjured up for later or for other uses. Such a definition includes visual and (for want of a better terminology) non-verbal or gestural or social literacies. Not limited to alphabetic literacy." (excerpt Nancy Kaplan)
MOOs: "MOO (Multi-User Dimension Object Oriented) is a sophisticated computer program that allows multiple users to connect via the Internet to a shared database of rooms and other objects, and interact with each other and the database in synchronous time." (excerpt from LinguaMoo, Cynthia Haynes-Burton and Jan Run Holmevik)
MUDs: "M.U.D. stands for Multi-User Dimension, a general term for a text-based virtual environment in which users from all over the world can interact in real-time. These virtual environments are often quite large and elaborate, comprising thousands of interlocked descriptions of various settings or "rooms"; a parlor, or a meadow, might be linked to other parts of the house, or field, and from there to a virtual town, city, forest, mountain range, or whatever the writer's imagination might desire. Users appear as characters in these settings, moving about (usually by typing in compass directions that correspond to the "exits" from the "room" that they are in), joining other characters controlled by other users, grouping together with them for exploration, conversation, friendship, debate, even romance. Many MUDs may have hundreds of players logged on at any given time." Excerpt from MOOs, MUDs and Other Virtual Hangouts)
Navigation: See The Electronic Labyrinth on navigation.
Network: See The Electronic Labyrinth on network.
Node: See The Electronic Labyrinth on node.
Orality: In Orality and Literacy, Walter Ong argues that the thoughts and expressions of an oral culture tend to be:
Readerly Reader: The consumer/reader, the readerly reader, is "intransitive: he is in short, serious" (4), submissively serious about dismantling the literary object or occupying its space (10). As a readerly subject (univocal, anterior to the text), the consumer/reader occupies a space in the larger symbolic order at once familiar, natural, and inevitable. Meanings aren't produced--they just are because they transcribe the Real (the transcendental signified) which is anterior to, exceeds, and controls signification through the hypotactic relationship between signifier and signified. (Barthes, S/Z)
Rhizome: (from Guattari and Deleuze's A Thousand Plaueaus)
"The rhizome is an anti-genealogy" (11).
" . . . a rhizome is not amenable to any structural or gnerative model. It is a stranger to any ideas of genetic axix or deep structure (12).
"The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory, or antimemory. The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. . . . the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states" (21).
"A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb 'to be,' but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, 'and . . . and . . . and.' This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb 'to be.'" (25)
Approximate characteristics:
Technopoly: The assumptions of the thought-world of Technopoly: "These include the beliefts tht the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts." (Postman, 51)
Virtual Classroom: The electronic, learning community where students and teaching faculty interact using Internet listservs and the World Wide Web.
Virtual University: You are able to participate in courses by using your computer and the Internet/World Wide Web to send assignments, communicate with Teaching Faculty, and interact with your classmates.
Writerly Reader: The writerly reader is the re-reading producer/writer who is neither an "innocent subject, anterior to the text" nor a master of the text's signified. The writerly reader re-reads/writes, a reading/writing "which places behind the transparency of suspense . . . the anticipated knowledge of what is to come in the story" (165), multiplying signifiers so that the text disseminates a plurality of meanings without being delegated to "a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure" (12). This reading/writing makes the closure of the text more and more difficult. This rereading is an immediate rereading, a reading of a text "as if it had already been read" (15), a reading by which we recommence difference "as though under the effect of a drug" (16). (Barthes, S/Z)
World Wide Web: The World Wide Web, or WWW, is a graphical representation of Internet resources based on the hypertext concept. On the Internet, the WWW is a system whereby organizations and individuals may construct hypertext presentations, or "pages," which everyone may view using a WWW browser (such as Netscape or Mosaic), which is simply an application which retrieves and displays hypertext located elsewhere on the Internet.
See Mitchell's discussion in City of Lights.