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Digital Discourse
dD both theoretical and practical
Our goal harks back to the time honored search for an integration between analysis and synthesis, between the fragments and the whole. The wider relevance of our approach is that it faces squarely the problems generally recognized as being posed by the unbridled development of the Internet. Our suggestion is that we should use it more rather than less, introducing an approach that allows multiple planes to be developed concurrently in such a way that they interlace structurally with each other and allow a multi-linear argument to be developed.
It is what I call “digital discourse,” an epistemic system parallel to that of a uni-linear sequential narrative as is normally available in printed format (or electronically in similar analog formats). In a website constructed with this in mind, there is a dynamic inter-planarity, in the sense that multiple concurrent planes “discourse” with each other and together create a whole. The concurrence of inter-planarity and multi-linearity may be also expressed with the term “polyhedral.”
We may represent this diagrammatically as follows (where A is the core narrative, and B and C parallel planes):
The theory was first presented in full in the book A Critique of Archaeological Reason, and then developed in various articles. It is now being expanded in a dedicated website, d-discourse.net. This website is currently being written, and one of the first goals of the project is to fully complete the website and to publish at the same time a parallel printed book. They will also serve as a detailed introduction to the conceptual nature of the various other websites where the theory is implemented.
Back to top: For a website theory: examples