In this Age of Deconstruction, the document is being taken apart every which way from a French Sunday. You've got documents that are paperless, paperless documents that are pageless, pageless documents that are queries, query documents that are agents. I prefer to think of documents as ecstatic.
Ékstasis. Standing outside of oneself. Beyond oneself.
An ecstatic document is one whose value is not what lies within it but what it points to.
A good Mosaic document is ecstatic. You read it not so much for what it says but for the links it shows you to other information.
This change in documents is itself ecstatic - it points beyond itself to changes in our culture at large - for documents can condition our way of thinking and acting in vastly different ways.
If you want to see how deeply the nature of documents affects us, consider one type of document - the book. Books not only give knowledge shape, they give knowledge permanence. We rest better knowing that our culture's knowledge is preserved in books. Otherwise, the Alexandrian conflagration would have been nothing more than a warehouse fire.
That's how things were. Now documents are on the Net clothed in Mosaic. What's different about documents isn't that they have new types of content but that they point instead of speak. You use them as much as you read them. They have value because they can show you what else is of significance. Their expertise is less about having contents and more about knowing how to help you look.
So, remembering that what makes a paradigm shift fundamental is that its results cannot be foreseen from the left side of the chasm, let's speculate about what our culture might be in for:
Knowledge changes. Knowledge becomes not content but a talent, just as musical ability denotes what you can do, not what you contain.
Relationships gain value. The relationship of ideas becomes more important than the ideas, just as information is more important than data. The expert is the one who sees (or can find out) how things relate, not the one who has the most facts.
The author's voice returns. As every reader becomes an author - assembling information and making it available - the role of authors will be not only to assemble interesting links or even to express a point of view. Readers will seek authors for their voice, the way they express and condition the information pointers they assemble.
Phenomenology rules! Philosophical phenomenology of the sort championed by Martin Heidegger will make progress on this continent, as it believes that humans are not containers of perceptions but instead are always already out of themselves, into the world and toward the future; this is a philosophy that already characterizes itself explicitly as ékstasis.
Men stay the same. If one buys into the generalization that men attempt to be self-contained power centers and women attempt to be networked and connected, the change in the document paradigm probably won't change anything at all. Instead of pushing men toward connectivity, it may just turn them into competitive knowledge jockeys. Some things never change.
