Back to top: For a website theory: introduction
A website theory
A full theoretical statement will be found in a dedicated website, d-discourse.net. It focuses on the way in which a website should be used as a proper epistemic system, through the application of an interplanar approach that requires new skills in “writing” and “reading” a website. In this chapter, I will outline the key concepts that go into such website theory
The various websites in the Cybernetica Mesopotamica system are structured so as to achieve the goals here briefly articulated as theory They serve different purposes and come from different types of input, so the details of their implementation differ, but they share some basic common principles, which are summarized here.
Back to top: For a website theory: introduction
A basic dichotomy
In current culture, websites have quickly become an established channel for scholarly communication, but there is a profound epistemic dichotomy in their structure.
On the one hand, they have a truly digital dimension as databases: they serve a function as containers, where data are stored with an immensely greater potential for retrieval than is the case with pre-digital tools.
On the other hand, websites have remained quite atrophied with regard to the articulation of a properly digital argument. The argument, one that leads to original conclusions from known premises, is relegated to separate analog versions, whether in the form of .PDF renderings of printed publications, or as their .HTML equivalents. These are not integrated with the data, but juxtaposed to them.
Back to top: For a website theory: introduction
Artificial Argument
The current trend of Artificial Intelligence aims precisely in this direction: it constructs an argument. In fact, it may be more accurate to speak of an Artificial Argument: what we obtain is a sequential rearrangement of known data along lines that are suggested by the content of the individual cells that have already been accessed and stored.
In this regard, the goal of a website theory is to show how to approach from a different angle the new complex epistemic realities that digitality makes possible. We must reclaim for natural intelligence the ability to control the digital discourse specoifically as emodied in websites.
Back to top: For a website theory: introduction
Lessons from the past: language and writing
As we seek to educate ourselves to this new dimension, a reflection on the origin of language and of writing is helpful in this respect.
Sounds referring to things or events were an indispensable pre-condition of language, but were far from constituting a linguistic reality. Language emerged only when it became possible to render logical connections through a proper syntactical structure embodied in a vocal medium. And it certainly must have taken a great deal of time before the difference became clear and every speaker became accustomed to the power of the new medium. There was oibviously no discussion as to te validity of the new epistemic system, i. e., a system that allwoed a wholly new control on knowledge. But the immense efficiency of the system made it so that at soe point there was in fact no option as to be or not be speaking.
Just as for the relationship between sound and language, so graphic representations of things had little in common with writing, even though such representations (pictograms) were a necessary precondition. The real and full import of the new medium was in the articulate connection among signs and the organization of thought in a structured visible format. This extra-somatic extension of epistemics ws revolutionary. But, while everyone in any given linguistic group had to become a speaker of the shared language, very few acquired the new know-how and became scribes. And yet, everyone in the social group became dependent on the scribal art, even when, as in the majority of cases, people could neither write nor read. It was a para-literate or -para-scribal situaion not unlike the one we have today vis-à-vis programming.
Back to top: For a website theory: introduction