Aspects of new electronic writing technology and some consequences for writing, text and communication.
The paper is a contribution to the workshop discussion on text and discourse at the 1994 research congress of the Nordic Association for Semiotic Studies.
The term 'world on paper' is taken from Eisenstein's (1993) work on the printing press as an agent of change. She points to the Alexandrian culture of learning and claims that it was not surpassed "until printing made it possible to put the 'world on paper' for all armchair travellers to see" (ibid:503). I shall not argue her instrumentalist view on the effects of printing here, but adopt her seminal term and put it up against my term 'virtual space' which is based on the popularized and commercialized term 'virtual reality' which associations are hazy and meaning blurred. To the term 'virtual' I add the concept of space which I hope to make clearer in due course.
But first some words about writing, which is a social system for reflecting upon and communicating about the world. In a very general way, to write is to create meaning about the world for oneself and for others. In this connection, however, I shall apply an instrumentalist approach which is limited but helpfull nevertheless. In a more limited perspective writing is a tool to organize, store and present information whether we write with a pen on paper, with a typewriter or with electronic information-processing tools. The writing technology we apply will influence the way we organize our information, how we store it, and the way it is presented to others (Gaur 1987). Whether we are aware of it or not, our writing is an interaction between ourselves as writers and the technology we make use of in the process. In that way writing has always been a physical activity, processing information with a set of tools.
All writing is applying some technology in the process of organizing, storing and presenting information. The writer may organize his information according to the conventions of print and store it on paper. He may also use an electronic writing tool that organizes data in a different way and stores it electronically as binary codes. No matter what technology a writer makes use of, it influences the process and product of writing, and adds something to what is being written.
Up to now writing in our Western culture has mainly been the use of the pen, typewriter and printing press, and the storing of the more or less finished product on the visual surface of paper. With new electronic communication tools, however, this is changing. The most obvious change may be that our texts are no longer necessarily the physical objects of the written paper, but as often electronically stored binary codes of which we might fetch copies and convert to recognizable signs in the form of pixels displayed on a computer screen.
I use the term 'sign' even though it sometimes might evoke what Eco calls a 'naive and non-relational notion of 'sign''. But he goes on to say that this notion should not be abandoned in ordinary language and in colloquial semiotic discussions, so I shall use it whenever it presupposes a correlational nature of the sign-function (Eco 1979).
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