At the Book/Ends conference (SUNY@Albany October 2000) Derrida proclaimed the web to be a book. What is your opinion on this subject?

Of course I'd have to know the context before commenting on what Derrida specifically might mean by such a statement (an extension forward of the embracing notion of archewriting, similar to the reach into orality noted in DE LA GRAMMATOLOGIE?)

But if we drop the "Derrida" part and just think about the statement itself the meaning is unproblematic.

The very interface name of web PAGE notes the status of the web as a transitional medium, partly literate, partly electrate. The current state of the web will be considered at some point in the not too distant future the way we think of the diorama in relation to contemporary cinema.

In terms of the history of the apparatus, Plato's dialogue is a transitional form also, from orality to literacy. The dialogue form (a written conversation, a simulation of a Socratic interview) which scholars stress was an invention and not a recording of an established practice (invented both by Socrates orally and then Plato in writing). The conversation served as an INTERFACE metaphor, to the extent that oral peoples encountering literacy for the first time would be familiar at least with face-to-face interaction. Once inside this experience however the interlocutor is introduced to DIALECTIC -- a feature native to literacy and entirely new and unfamiliar. PHAEDRUS is the prototype and is considered to be the first discourse on method in the Western tradition. For the dialogue Plato retained some features of orality and discarded others; similarly he foregrounded some features of literacy and suppressed others.

Do we yet have a web "PHAEDRUS"? Just from the point of view of the technology we have literacy at work, in the medium of the page, but also in the HTML layout features of the list and the table. Jack Goody has shown that the list and the table are features native to alphabetic writing, and that they are fundamental to the literate mode of thought throughout its evolution. Many websites are mostly literate, and are electrate only in the most basic way, drawing on "magazine" features of photography and a primitive non-linearity. We can see that the technology is advancing rapidly, with streaming video (Media Cleaner makes streaming a point-and-click operation) and high-end graphics editors automating design and programming features (e.g. Dreamweaver with its javascript goodies). What we do NOT have, as far as I know, is an institutional practice, the equivalent of method (dialectic), that Netizens could use to reason and communicate in a way native to electracy. A bootstrapping process is underway, necessarily, with practitioners intuitively or self-consciously adapting literate but also pop culture and entertaiment and art forms to the possibilities of the technology. Eventually this process will produce the needed invention, the practice that will have to be taught and learned for individuals to be electrate.

My project is to propose a working prototype for the logic-rhetoric-poetics of electracy.

As for Derrida's statement, I would revise it to say: The web is a book-advertisement.

I apologize for not providing context. In essence, Derrida's statement was in response to some comments from the audience expressing a concern over a slight lack of focus on the Internet, or much of what electronic artists and writers might call forms beyond the book. I took Derrida's comment to mean that most of what had been discussed at the conference applied to the Web as apparatus, as structure, as scaffolding for writing.

I agree with you as to the web being a provisional form, that other forms and interfaces will arise in the future that will make the web look quite static and people will wonder what the fascination was.

Also, in terms of the Internet I see importance in understanding some of the history you have outlined. Particularly how the conversation in the Platonic dialogues serves as interface metaphor. To add to this, in a formal sense, could it not be said that the Internet as apparatus is an interface in search of a metaphor? Certainly there are many metaphors for the interface, but most focus on the termination of the exchange rather than the exchange itself.

Though I do understand the connection between lists and tables and alphabetic writing, I am not sure this is carried over entirely into "modern" html production. Agreed that tables and lists in the HTML universe were originally intended to be used within this context, but their use/value to hypermedia artists/writers has moved far beyond that. Tables nested in other tables is a fundamental aspect of complex HTML as they help to organize space. So, they have moved beyond the alphabetic to be ideogrammatic, or even transparent, from a design rather than informational perspective. Of course, this is also using tables as they were never intended to be used, even within HTML. So to a certain extent practice has outpaced technology, and both have a lead on pedagogy. This is from a production/creation point of view, as it still doesn't consider an actual electrate formation of information, or its exchange...

Do you think there will come a time when the PAGE does not play a significant role in literate/electrate forms? I see the page/screen, book/web comparisons increasingly problematic.

There will come a time when we are "native" to the apparatus of electracy. Meanwhile, it is useful for heuretic purposes to think about electracy by means of the analogy with the shift from orality to literacy. I have a couple of projects underway based on points of invention suggested by this analogy.

THE COLLECTIVE PAGE. To reiterate McLuhan's point that the content of the new medium is the old media, one reason why civilizational renaissances coincide with apparatus shifts, such as the "Golden Age of Greece" with the assimilation of alphabetic writing, and the European Renaissance coinciding with the invention of printing, has to do with this capacity of the new medium to deliver to one generation of people the complete history of past achievements. To see one's heritage whole in this way has a powerfully generative effect. Something similar is happening in our time with digital interactive networked technologies, with their point-and-click, menued interfaces for smart databases, smart search engines, and the like. The next generation of mediamakers will have grown up with a TV rerun programming that will have made available to them the entire history of cinema and television, not to mention an audio-visual paraphrase of nearly every field of knowledge, in popularized form.

I remember my grandmother commenting on the experience of her later years, when old age and health problems restricted her activities mostly to watching TV all day. She preferred nature programs, and through the wonders of satellite dish technology had access to a considerable number of channels that specialized in these sorts of programs. She noted that she never thought she'd live long enough to have witnessed the sex acts of every creature known to man. A veritable Noah's Ark of videotaped zoological screwing. To keep herself amused she started a kind of "birdwatcher's" inventory so whenever there was a coupling she hadn't seen before she logged it -- date, time, channel, critter. She was in her 90s and had cataracts so I'm not sure exactly what all was going on there.

Anyway, about the collective page. The marvel of the written, especially the printed, page was that by means of library storage, it put before the eyes and mind of an individual the entire domain of human achievement. All the practices of literacy developed over a couple of millenia were designed to help individuals turn information into knowledge, to think within this enormous amount of data. Eventually, as may be witnessed in our own time, this literate pratice resulted in an information overload that revealed the limits of our apparatus. The institutional expression of "method" (anlaysis and synthesis) is specialization. The practice of the page requires by now the splintering of learning into highly specialized sub-domains, to the point that our society is a kind of collective "idiot savant." We have a command of isolated areas of amazing learning, without the ability to grasp the consequences collectively of the synthesis, of what happens when we implement our specialized knowledge. We are collectively to electracy what Euthyphro was individually to the literate Socrates: lacking in collective self-knowledge, with a learning that is in contradiction with itself, acting on assumptions that cannot be supported (Euthyphro is the one who was going to prosecute his father for impiety, but could not give Socrates a coherent definition of what Piety "is".).

The collective page project aims at exploiting the capacity or potential of the Internet to put everyone "on the same page." What is needed is a practice (institutional practices are one register of an apparatus) that allows specialists to formulate their research in such a way that it takes into account how it will interface with other domains of knowledge. Individuals necessarily for the forseeable future will be educated in specializations, but at the same time this education needs to include explicit experiences aimed at learning how to collaborate across the divisions of knowledge, and across institutional differences.

Something we may want to come back to is the question of how this collective practice is to be designed. We know its purpose: to do for the collective what the page did for the individual in literacy.

Next I will describe the other project I mentioned as transitional between page and screen.

I especially like the Euthyphro analogy. This seems very true to me. Though we are in the midst of shift, directing this shift so to speak, we are at a loss to really grasp the shift, or conceptualize the magnitude. Or, really even see the new apparatus.

I see a lot of potential with these ideas and can see how this would, at the moment, be difficult to create in any natural sense for the exact reason you mention -- specialization.

It is interesting as a web developer to see how much emphasis is put upon context for content and the customization of interfaces for individual users. From this perspective the institution of specialization reaches through the web to the user and lets them determine which information they feel they need to know. A sort of selective specialization, or filtering to mitigate the impact of overwhelming resources on the human apparatus. Though the information may be collective the configuration and consumption is specialized. OF course, this reduces the network to the individual level so specialization is default as use, focus and perspective are variable terminal to terminal.

The other project.....