Unlike fictions, which simply present something else, cybertexts represent something beyond themselves.
— Aarseth, Espen J. “Nonlinearity and Literary Theory.” Hyper / Text Theory. Ed. Landow, George P. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 51-86.
What is unusual (but increasingly characteristic of the late age of print) is that, before, during, and after they were talks or essays, these narratives were often e-mail messages, hypertext “nodes,” and other kinds of electronic text that, as will be seen, moved nomadically and iteratively from one talk to another, one draft to another, one occasion or perspective to another. The nomadic movement of ideas is made effortless by the electronic medium that makes it easy to cross-borders (or erase them) with the swipe of a mouse, carrying as much of the world as you will on the etched arrow of light that makes up a cursor.
— Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. 1996.
Although print remains indispensable, it no longer seems indispensable: that is its curious condition in the late age of print.
— Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space. Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print. 2 ed. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2001.
In the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. Its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient. The professional specialization involved in its making would be presumption. The generalities of its applicability would be an affront. The audience would be the artist and their life would be art.
— Gould, Glenn. “The Prospects of Recording.” The Glenn Gould Reader. 1966. Ed. Page, Tim. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. 331-53.
This overlapping of professional and lay responsibility in the creative process does tend to produce a set of circumstances that superficially suggests the largely unilateral participation of the pre-Renaissance world. In fact, it is deceptively easy to draw such parallels, to assume that the entire adventure of the Renaissance and of the world which it created was a gigantic historical error. But we are not returning to a medieval culture. It is a dangerous oversimplification to suggest that under the influence of electronic media we could retrograde to some condition reminiscent of the pre-Renaissance cultural monolith. The technology of electronic forms makes it highly improbable that we will move in any direction but one of even greater intensity and complexity; and the fact that a participational overlapping becomes unashamedly involved with the creative process should not suggest a waning of the necessity for specialized techniques. (…) What will happen, rather, is that new participation areas will proliferate and that many more hands will be required to achieve the execution of a particular environmental experience.
— Gould, Glenn. “The Prospects of Recording.” The Glenn Gould Reader. 1966. Ed. Page, Tim. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. 331-53.
We are in the late age of print; the time of the book has passed. The book is an obscure pleasure like the opera or cigarettes.
— Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995. 1996.
(…) the work of art is not a checklist or the sum of individual techniques or experiments but, rather, the creation of a model. A work of art, like all images, incorporates different qualities, while also suggesting new paths. And so it possesses, by definition, qualities that stimulate the imagination of its author and its viewers.
— Francastel, Pierre. Art & Technology. 1956. Trans. Cherry, Randal. In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books, 2000.
Technology does not create a society’s values; it serves them and materializes them.
— Francastel, Pierre. Art & Technology. 1956. Trans. Cherry, Randal. In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books, 2000.
Hypertext philosophy should be considered not as a single author controlling a line into a text but as a net of linear texts confronting one another in a kind of endless expansion, as they have in fact done in the history of philosophy.
— Kolb, David. “Socrates in the Labyrinth.” Hyper / Text Theory. Ed. Landow, George P. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. 323-44.
The printed text is supposed to represent the words of an author in definitive or ‘final’ form. For print is comfortable only with finality.
— Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge, 1982. 2007.
