cyber-incas
Sorry about the attempt for a cute title. This post -inspired by Martin’s moment of genius in tying together ancient and post-modern communication technology- has been something that I’ve played with posting, but probably wasn’t going to get around to it.
I’m reading a bunch of stuff on immersion for my course on the sociology of gaming with Bart. One thing that I’ve enjoyed recently is Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature by Aarseth(it’s old stuff - 1997 - many of you already know most of this, but it’s new to me). In it, he denies the split between “old” text and cybertext being along the lines of paper vs electronics or computers.
“In the current discussions of “computer literacy,” hypertext, “electronic language,” and so on, there seems to emerge an explicit distinction between the printed, or paper-based, text and the electronic text, both with singular and remarkably opposing qualities. The arguments for this distinction are sometimes historical, sometimes technological, but eminently political; that is, they don’t focus on what these textual genres or modes are but on their assumed functional difference from each other.”
Instead, Aarseth says that it’s about the perspective. Old text is linear and corresponds to “the traditional threesome of author/sender, text/message, and reader/receiver”…” In his phenomenology of literature, Ingarden (1973, 305-13) insists that the integrity of the “literary work of art” depends on the “order of sequence” of its parts; without this linear stability the work would not exist.”
Cybertext is only different because of the perspective: “Instead of defining text as a chain of signifiers, as linguists and semioticians do, I use the word for a whole range of phenomena, from short poems to complex computer programs and databases. As the cyber prefix indicates, the text is seen as a machine–not metaphorically but as a mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs. Just as a film is useless without a projector and a screen, so a text must consist of a material medium as well as a collection of words. The machine, of course, is not complete without a third party, the (human) operator, and it is within this triad that the text takes place. The boundaries between these three elements are not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can be defined only in terms of the other two. Furthermore, the functional possibilities of each element combine with those of the two others to produce a large number of actual text types.”
This is cool because it allowed me to think about a lot of paper books as cybertext / hypertext (I already knew you could do that, but i really didn’t understand why - except for the examples people used of books where you could “jump around” in the text and still have some kind of meaning).
And I’ve been reading (and thinking a lot about) communications history, because of the people at CRACIN. An important tenent of Communications is that cultures are, in many ways, based around a certain mode of communication (oral, clay tablets, paper, printing press) and that the mode of communication has large effects on the culture and on the abilities of thought of the people within that culture.
So while waiting for my bus to visit my sister in Seattle, I was shown to a flea market and I found a book on Communication in History by David Crowley. In it, there’s a paper called “Civilization without Writing –The Incas and the Quipu” by Marcia and Robert Ascher.
Basically, every empire / large civilization needed a way to communicate across long distances to keep everyone under control. Every ancient civilization used writing to do this - except the Incas. They didn’t have writing, but they had Quipu. Check out a picture. The quipu was a system of knotted ropes. There was a beginning and an end (horizontal) , and ropes hung off (vertical) the main rope. Then, ropes could hang off (horizontal) those secondary ropes, and so own. Each rope had knots to communicate some kinds of information (numbers, i think) and colours of ropes were used to communicate other kinds of info.
What’s cool is that these texts were not linear. They had alternative branches. The Incas (at least the “scribes” and the minority that could “read” quipu) made and read cybertext / hypertext all the time.