Cybertext
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term cybertext is derived from the word cybernetics, which was coined by Norbert Wiener in his book Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), which in turn comes from the Greek word kybernetes -helmsman. The fundamental idea in the development of the theory of cybernetics is the concept of feedback: a portion of information produced by the system that is taken, total or partially, as input. Cybernetics is the science that studies control and regulation in systems in which there exists flow and feedback of information. Though first used by science fiction poet Bruce Boston (Cybertexts, 1992), the term cybertext was brought to the literary world’s attention by Espen Aarseth (1997); his concept of cybertext focuses in the organization of the text in order to analyze the influence of the media as an integral part of the literary dynamics. According to Aarseth, cybertext is not a genre in itself; in order to classify traditions, literary genres and aesthetic value, we should inspect texts at a much more local level. The concept of cybertext offers a way to expand the reach of literary studies to include phenomena that are perceived today as foreign or marginal (Aarseth, 1997). In Aarseth’s work, cybertext denotes the general set of text machines which, operated by readers, yield different texts for reading. Clearly, an encyclopedia is a cybertext according to this definition, as well as hypertext.
