The Instability of the "Text"
"The OED says that the word 'text' originates in Latin, meaning 'that which is woven' or 'web.' While this etymology certainly seems pertinent when speaking of hypertext, or 'non-sequential writing--text that branches and allows choices to the reader,'[Nelson, Literary Machines] it helps little in providing a distinction between paper text and digital text. What's certain is that both Luddite and hacker agree that a difference does exist. But if the same word inscribed on paper and displayed on a computer screen means the same thing--and how could it not?--then the only explanation is that we perceive a discrepancy, that the medium itself somehow affects how we think of the words.
"The printed 'u' on paper can be touched, maybe even smeared, and shown to exist physically. It is a tactile representation of the idea 'u,' the commonly agreed-upon vowel that in English occupies the twenty-first position of the alphabet. On the monitor we know that the "u" is not a particular group of electrons, for without permanently losing the letter we can move it off-screen, back to the computer's memory . . .
"How can we possibly define this digital letter, much less the text it composes, when its most basic signification is so varied and variable? The answer is that we cannot, but it is our very inability to do so that alters our perception of electronic text. [Sven] Birkerts articulates the experience thus: 'words removed to storage, rendered invisible, seem to have reversed expressive direction and to have gone back into thought. Their entity dissolves into a kind of neural potentiality.' [The Gutenberg Elegies ] Perhaps in its virtuality, the electronic word can best be described (albeit paradoxically) as a signified with out a corporeal signifier, whereas in general readers (Derrida notwithstanding) have agreed that the printed word has presence. That the reader can touch the printed word, handle the book, assert its 'there-ness' is soothing, an illusion of textual immutability in the deconstructive chaos of endless deferral. To the mind weaned on the indelibility of the printed word, electronic text seems unstable, less epistemologically graspable. I submit that this mostly unconscious perception of instability generates anxiety in the reader, anxiety of the type usually written off to the 'it just feels different' category . . .
"One consequence of reducing the digital text to the status of electric impulses is that clear-cut distinctions between verbal and non-verbal elements cease to exist. That is, as far as the computer (or anyone browsing through binary code) knows, a digital representation of the Mona Lisa is ontologically no different from, say, Walter Pater's verbal description of her. It's all ones and zeros. To be sure, after the information is processed in the bowels of the computer, the screen presents two very different things: Da Vinci's painting look's like a painting and Pater's text reads like text. Nevertheless, on the virtual palimpsest of the computer chip the painting and text are essentially identical. While most computer users will never consider this conundrum, the difficulty of differentiating between text and non-text at the most basic level has a more conspicuous macroscopic counterpart. Hypertext, specifically hypermedia, in which visual elements (even full-motion video) are woven into the fabric of the text like a modern-day illuminated manuscript, allows visual manipulation of text blocks (called lexias) and graphical depiction of structural features.(John Tolva The Heresy of Hypertext ).
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