Imagologies
Esa Saarinsen and Mark C Taylor, 1992

Links
mediamatics
http://www.mediamatic.net Wired Magazine History of Hypertext
Other Fonty-hypertext book: Marhsal McLuhan\'s Medium is the massage

The grey area between printed book and electronic publications. The first international tele-seminar. As an experiment they taught a seminar on media philosophy in 1992 via videoconferencing and email. They get the idea of publishing a book on their experience, but have no time to put it together, so they simply took most of the texts that were sent back and forth and bound them in a non-linear, fragmentary book. As such the book is a precursor of what was to come, the breakdown of text as was known, a mixing of subjects, fragments of meaning and pointers to the next step in a conversation. A picture, three words and a special font carry more meaning than chapters of telelogical discourse. Reading it now you can almost smell the hypertext.

Imagologies was written for people who have no time to read. Saarinsen scans instead of reading,he says: Shock-effect reading, that is what I would recommend. Hypertextual reading, in the sense in which you jump around at will in a given textmass, not necessarily intending to grasp the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Instead, you just pump gas in your engine. \" He gives his students a random photocopied page from a random book and asks the student to comment upon it.

Submitted by
Guillermo Acevedo

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