| Furthermore, I think Hypertext 2.0 is wrong in too readily alluding that the hypertextual dissolution of centrality makes the medium such a potentially democratic one, and not only for the reasons I stated somewhere else. First, hypertext on the WWW is only a partial feature of the Internet as a medium (and what to think of the current hypertext netiquette that derived from this medium's white anglo-american background?); one can argue on the contrary for instance that the organisation of the Internet actually consists of several layers of very highly hierarchical protocols. And second, the notion of decentrality and the proliferation of differences in our society being liberating is already widely criticised by theorists such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their recent book Empire, or by Frederic Jameson's article on the postmodern being the cultural logic of late-capitalism, where both argue that this recent proliferation of differences in our highly-technologised society reinforces the typically Western ideologies of consumerism and commodification. No current democratisation of ideologies so far due to the new technologies, I am afraid. |