In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

told, singer and audience play the dynamic uncertainty off against their prior knowledge of how events must evolve. Beowulf’s biography will mirror Sigemund’s, and decidedly not Heremod’s. Tradition, or the oCloud, thus provides a nuanced sense of irony, dependent as much on shared oAgora dynamics as any individual contribution. 7. Texts can’t connect. Texts don’t interact with the Cloud or with tradition. Oh, you can store textual data in the form of static eFiles in the Cloud and then access that fixed material electronically, and even edit and redeposit the edited version. But when those materials tip toward interactive networks with potential for navigation via options and cocreativity, they aren’t texts anymore. The tAgora doesn’t support shared networks because it doesn’t support pathways (Impossibility of tPathways) or variation within limits. It functions by amassing finite instances and then making them locally—not systemically—available according to the restrictive rules of that particular marketplace. Instances are all there is, as the fraught concept of intertextuality (Texts and Intertextuality)—which by nature and etymology cannot apply to either the eAgora or the oAgora—very clearly demonstrates. Nor can texts interact with tradition. The common misconception that the advent of writing technology cues the immediate closure of the oAgora has proven time and again to be nothing more than blind tAgora bias. Writing is used initially for record-keeping and similar accounting procedures (Spectrum of Texts), most certainly not for preserving group and personal identity, remembering history, transmitting remedies for disease, and the myriad other social functions performed by oral traditions. Societies and individuals are quite capable of becoming and remaining citizens of more than one marketplace (Citizenship in Multiple Agoras), transacting some of their business in the oAgora and some in the tAgora. What’s more, without a pathway-driven connection, there’s simply no way for texts to enter or influence ongoing oral traditions—except through the agency of go-betweens or performer/readers who can communicate fluently in both the arena of the text (Arena of the Text) and the arena of oral tradition. As artifacts, texts don’t connect to the oCloud anymore than they connect to the eCloud. L Contingency It’s all around us Contingency is everywhere, if we’re willing to look: in politics, in economics, in philosophy, in social identity, in the plans we make, even in the plans that others make for us. Here is a brief but perhaps representative litany. Political successions often consist of a nest of contingencies. Home-buying is often made contingent on 60 . Cloud and Tradition various related issues such as appraisal, loan qualification, home inspection, and so forth. Philosophers15 define contingency as “the study of propositions that are not necessarily true or necessarily false.” Some people understand the very bedrock of personal identity as a contingent social function subject to many variables both intraculturally and crossculturally. Every flight itinerary we arrange is, as we only too often discover en route, contingent on weather, traffic, and airline foibles. And the official organ of the American Association of Actuaries is named—what else?—Contingencies magazine. So we can’t escape contingency, and that’s the most salient point. In truth we’re always and everywhere negotiating potentials and possibilities, working through them in real time, not asynchronously (Real-time versus Asynchronous ). After the fact, that process may get conveniently flattened into a lockstep, here’s-what-happened narrative. But until that juncture we’re far too caught up in the evolving story to recount how it went (before it happened). We’re too busy living the events to manufacture the distance required to reduce them to a tidy, past-tense scenario. What does contingency mean? The adjective “contingent” reveals a familiar kind of family tree,16 reaching back to Latin and moving through Old French before making its Middle English debut in 1385, roughly about the time Geoffrey Chaucer began writing his Canterbury Tales. In today’s language the word has the general sense of “liable to occur, but not with certainty; possible,” as when we speak of some favorable or hoped-for result as “contingent upon” some still pending action or development . The continuous availability of the Pathways Project website, for example, is contingent upon a number of factors: a connection to the Internet, a browser, smoothly functioning servers at the University of Missouri, the technological expertise of the webmaster, and not least electricity! For our purposes—in this node and...

Share