Bolstered by the recent advancements in technology, our society has gradually departed from the culture of the printed word to a computer culture structured by the digital word. Everyday the superior performance of computers appears to render printed literature more obsolete - e-mail and chat rooms have nearly eliminated traditional written letters, the Internet has all but replaced the need for libraries and paper catalogues and, soon, hypertext will completely overtake the realm of the printed novel. Computers have saturated our literary environment to such a degree that it is difficult to imagine a time when print was our most prized communication technology. To make an accurate hypothesis about the computer culture, and how it will affect the way we study and think about literature in the future, it is necessary to examine the development of past societies when faced with equally sweeping changes in literary technology.
The ancient Greeks were one of the first peoples to experience a pivotal technological revolution. This culture, once deemed illiterate or preliterate by scholars, has now been recognized as having, "its own coherence and dignity, and we have come to call it [an] oral rather than illiterate [society]" (Borgmann 38). Before Homeric epics like the Odyssey and the Iliad were transcribed into the large volumes we read and study today, these tales were told orally by a bard during daylong festivals. Hobart and Schiffman, authors of Information Age: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution, contend that the purpose of storytelling in this era wasn't, as many literates believe, to preserve the cultural history. Instead, memory served as a form of commemoration, a way to preserve the current culture, knowledge, values, and beliefs through the constant repetition of societal practices (Hobart and Schiffman 22).
These oral narratives rarely, if ever, reflected on the past as the content of a story; topics were limited to a discussion of the present and held little meaning beyond the physical objects or situations familiar to the audience. Once a certain set of ideas or practices became obsolete, they were excluded from the experiences enacted in a story, and all traces of their existence vanished from the culture. In this way, a community established common memories of the past, "providing all members of the community with the same point of reference" (Hobart and Schiffman 27).
The only system of writing at this time was a clumsy syllabic notation used for record keeping, so all anecdotes, thoughts, and comments had to be delivered face-to-face. For people of the oral culture, these stories were an event, uniting the speaker and his or her listeners by the experience of narrative. According to classicist scholar Eric A. Havelock, the bard used active verbs and concrete nouns, "to sweep the audience up into the rhythm of the song" (Hobart and Schiffman 20). Once the audience was absorbed in the sentiments of the story, they "became" the heroes, identifying uncritically with the plight of the fictional characters in scene after scene.
The emotional style of communication made it impossible for someone in the oral culture to distance him or herself rationally from the message of a story. "For us," say authors Hobart and Schiffman, "thinking entails a distance between the mind and the object of thought - we think 'about' something," but the participatory nature of oral literature prevented that type of perspective (Hobart and Schiffman 21). Audience members often listened to the bard without criticism or reflection, and had trouble separating the speaker's message from the way the message was expressed; if a bard told a story about an enemy city while shouting and frowning, it would be hard not to associate the anger of the bard with thoughts of the other city. One might have been able to see and understand obvious facts, like "All warriors are brave," or "Look out for that tree!" but they were unable to reflect on these ideas from an analytical perspective. They could think about brave warriors or how to avoid the falling tree, but they couldn't think about bravery itself or the dangers of any falling tree (Hobart and Schiffman 14). It wasn't until the advent of alphabetic literacy that people could objectively distinguish between his or her thinking self and the oral performances in which he or she might participate.
Once writing appeared on the cultural scene, it became a force, "that no preliterate society has been able to evade" (Borgmann 49). The alphabet translated nuances of speech into phonetic symbols, allowing conversations, stories, and ideas to be written down without distortion or simplification. Writing was a liberating technology for citizens of oral societies; people no longer had to be in direct communication in order to convey specific concepts. Citizens could study literature privately over time and space, and draw their own conclusions about the topics presented dispassionately on the page.
For the first time, readers could examine and remember epic stories objectively without having to identify emotionally with the actions or traits of the characters. This gave citizens of the oral culture the ability to refocus their energies on analyzing and rearranging written ideas, rather than concentrating on only what was heard and felt. Writing allowed citizens of the oral culture "the luxury of inattention"; by simply reading a set of recorded symbols readers could access any line of a narrative at will, or review the text to study details missed at first glance (Hobart and Schiffman 14). When ideas were transcribed to paper, they became mental objects that existed apart from the flow of speech. They could be physically held, manipulated, stored in the container of human memory, and sorted according to their noticeable characteristics. Humans began the first systematic attempts to make sense of the abstract oral world, by organizing it into hierarchical groupings.
However, printed literature permitted an accumulation of information to the point of over-saturation - once ideas were deemed archaic or useless, they didn't vanish as they did in oral culture, but remained forever memorialized in print. To sort through the amassing piles of printed literature, members of the print culture began organizing knowledge into compendiums and encyclopedias according to analytical groupings. Yet, even methodical libraries became unwieldy and complicated to access. As ideas grew infinitely more diffuse, people became bogged down with the mountains of findings and conclusions made by others. Information became so specialized that no two people could create the same connections between books of thought. Tracing these associations back in a linear way to their original literary influences was a hopeless endeavor.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush proposed a theory arguing that the human mind did not function in a sequential way, but through a complicated web of association. He maintained that although we cannot fully anticipate the hidden synapses of the mind, it might be possible to closely mimic the mind's indexing properties through the construction of certain machinery. Bush proposed the idea of the Memex, a machine that built a visible path out of the maze of human mental connections. With the touch of a display screen, people could share with others the trail of items that allowed them to come up with a specific conclusion or set of ideas, making it simpler for people to understand a particular individual's line of reasoning.
Fifteen years later, scholar Ted Nelson applied Bush's Memex theory to digital technology. His interest in "what would be the most beneficial extension of literature as we knew it" inspired Nelson to devise a vision for an electronic literature. He named this new technology "hypertext," and hypothesized the creation of a global network called "Xanadu" that could record non-sequential thought and still preserve meaning. The phenomenon of hypertext as Nelson perceived it would be multi-dimensional, interactive, and comprised of many threaded presentational forms (Whitehead). Nelson predicted that in the future humans would be reading and writing on computer screens, and he wanted to devise a system that found meaning in this form of literary culture and made it the most useful to people. In Nelson's opinion, literature was, "an ongoing system of interconnecting documents," all with links implicit and explicit between them (Nelson). These pathways of thought would constantly change as more information became available, removing the possibility of a final or definitive view of anything.
Nelson's vision was attained with the creation of the Internet, or World Wide Web. This technology combined the interactive elements of oral culture and immersive qualities of print to create a hybrid of traditional storytelling (Murray 71). Like its oral ancestors, computer culture, "erodes the boundaries between the real and the virtual" (Turkle 10). Users can participate with hypertexts much like they could with a bard - clicking on the various hyperlinks within a work closely resembles the oral audience members' collective body movements as they identify with a story. Computers also resemble the independence of print culture, because they do not require face-to-face interaction in order to attain information. This format is still in its infancy, and will not fully develop until it ceases to depend on its technological ancestors, instead of implementing its own expressive power.
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