Peter Lurie has a long-ish post called “Why the Web Will Win the Culture Wars for the Left: Deconstructing Hyperlinks” in which he explains the way in which hyperlinks embody deconstructionist views. Given that I used “deconstruct” twice in a sentence describing the piece, it is remarkably clear.

Peter thinks hyperlinks contain an implicit politics: “The Web is a postmodernist tool that inevitably produces a postmodernist perspective.” I think so, too, although I’m not quite as optimistic. There are too many ways the Net could go wrong.

FWIW, Peter and I are thinking along the same lines. Small Pieces Loosely Joined was on a very similar theme, and he should like (or possibly find very annoying) the end of Everything Is Miscellaneous, which argues that we are now building for one another a messy infrastructure of meaning…

(Thanks to Terry Heaton for the link.) [Tags: hyperlinks peter_laurie philosophy postmodernism]

Categories: Uncategorized dw