HYPER-LEX: A Technographical Dictionary
Paul Harris hybridizes the terms of hypertextual discourse and takes it to a higher power.
The spirit or at least pervasive desire of our age revolves around a sort of transparency: a desire to project ourselves as a surface of permeable traces, to exfoliate, let the inside become the outside, to become fully visible like the meat and bones of a Cronenberg character, while remaining invisible like the little hacker ghost (Turing’s Demon?) that tracks text in the Random Access Memory banks of the machine onto whose screen we splash words. In large part, the attractive force that transparency exerts is an effect of media culture; simultaneously, however, transparency marks a limit of im-mediacy - an unmediated, collapsed sensation where we can see the neurophysiology of our brains or the shapes of and linkages among our words. This is an immediacy of the sensory that never shades into the tactile - it is rather the immediacy of sensing the medium itself, of clicking tracks around the computer screen or dredging up hidden treasures on the Netscape of our lives.
“network” is a promiscuous and ubiquitous term, serving many functions in describing our modes of conduct and perception of the world: network serves as a structural design principle, modus operandi, technological environment and constraint, as a textual space and psychological model all in one.
