Page 37 - Cyberculture and New Media

28 Formalisms of Digital Text
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iconography of PowerPoint” and redirects the medium into its own kind of
3
expressive genre unrelated to any historically determined textual function .
Utilizing the tools of the tool, such as its ability to render arrows, for
aesthetic production in its own right, he subsumes the domain of text to that
of the image.

Figure 4. Sea of Possibilities, David Byrne, 2003, digital image.
Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery
Two divergent views – one pragmatic, one aesthetic – of the same
phenomenon, set the foundation for what has developed between the semi-
textual and the orthodox-textual: the space of the neo-textual where oral and
textual, and semi-improvised emerged, and we see a new kind of
conversational writing develop in the form of blogs, emails, and other
aleatory genres. History, always difficult to evade, continually integrates into
communicative forms. The last stage of protracted writing, embodied in the
essay or novel form, took place roughly six centuries ago. The process-based
diagrammatic textuality that we identify with the algorithmic or process
diagram reached completion in the twentieth century. But conversational
writing has no direct ancestor, except for the personal diary, which
nonetheless never assumed the sprawling and fragmentary form of common
contemporary usage. In notion, however, conversational writing is not
entirely new; a variety of it – “conversational literacy” – was central to the