Physical appearance

Immersed in societies that thrive on and reciprocally feed mass media communication, we have been living in an "information age" for decades.

But the label has only recently been applied to contemporary society, in response to the rapid integration of computer technology into practices of communication and production, and fails to indicate the extent to which computerized technologies impact our culture in unique and significant ways when compared with the technologies which preceded it. Computerized networking offers an era of rapid information exchange-of an interpersonal dialectic-which is continually modified and updated, all according to a variety of languages at play. An individual's physical appearance is neither implied nor relevant in the computerized network environment which defies those spatial and temporal laws of nature which govern our physical bodies. Language is exchanged unhindered by the usual distractions of physical appearance, gesture, and tone of voice, which are only rarely avoided in other communication technologies such as television, radio, and telephone.

text from Rhizome

Why automated search tools ?

Hypertext's original idea was to take advantage of electronic data processing to organize large quantities of information that would otherwise overwhelm a reader.

Two hundred years ago, the printing press made possible a similar innovation - the encyclopedia. Hypertext's older cousin combined topical articles with an indexing system to afford the researcher one or perhaps two orders of magnitude increase in the volume of accessible information. Early experience with hypertext suggests that it may ultimately yield an additional order of magnitude increase, by making directly accessible information that would otherwise be relegated to a bibliography. Hypertext's limiting factor appears not to be the physical size of some books, but rather the ability of the reader to navigate increasingly complex search structures.

Currently, additional increases in human information processing ability seem tied to developing more sophisticated automated search tools, though the present technology presents possibilities that remain far from fully explored.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts
-Jean-Philippe Pastor