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case, a significant part of the context for any individual performance or text will always lie outside the most expansive, comprehensive canon, just as it lay beyond the Alexandrian Library and the most ambitious acquisitions program in history. The Museum of Verbal Art must acknowledge these vital realities and reconfigure itself accordingly. Homer was right Homer had it right when, as he began navigating through the fantastic web of the Odyssey, he made this petition to a virtual resource undreamed of even by the Ptolemies: “Of these events from somewhere, O Muse, daughter of Zeus, speak also to us.” (Book 1, line 10). Of what events? All of Odysseus’s adventures, from boar-hunt to Trojan War to perilous trials and back home to reunion with Penelope. From where? From within the untextualized mythic reservoir of the oAgora. By whose agency? Under the aegis of the Muse, patroness of pathways and the OT internet. And to whom? Why, to Homer, to her beloved tribe of ancient singers and their audiences , and now, we hope, to future generations of Museum visitors. L Not So Willy-nilly Textual predisposition For many the oAgora and eAgora are venues for indeterminacy, “anythinggoes ” behavior, and even outright chaos. As media-technologies they seem to license undirected, scattershot activities, with surfers free to blaze their own individualized, unpredictable trails through a maze with far too many options. Here’s the often-cited problem in a nutshell: if performers or users can proceed just as they wish—lacking the one-way, exitless highway that predetermines our trek through linear texts—then how can we credit such an itinerary as valuable or valid? Couldn’t they just as easily (and at every step) have chosen differently, whether in the arena of oral tradition (Arena of Oral Tradition) or the arena of the web (Arena of the Web)? Wouldn’t told and retold stories “diverge,” perhaps beyond recognition? Likewise, isn’t the web experience inherently inaccurate as well as helplessly contingent? Doesn’t faithful, logical communication inescapably fall victim to willy-nilly surfing? Routes, not ruts The very act of posing such questions reveals our hidden media bias. By crediting the fixity-based fiction of accuracy (Accuracy), we fail to recognize the creative and expressive advantages of contingency (Contingency). Understood Not So Willy-nilly . 163 on their own terms, OT and IT aren’t inferior technologies at all; they’re just different, with different advantages and disadvantages. Consisting not of artifacts but of systems that require active, cocreative navigation by users, OT and IT tap into the power of networked alternatives (Systems versus Things). Functionally, the pathways that characterize the oral marketplace and electronic marketplace must by their very nature remain open for exploration and thus unpredetermined. They do their job by fostering innovative thinking and communication, and that means denying the foreclosure of finality or epitome. In these two nontextual agoras experience is emergent, reality remains in play, and the arenas themselves are forever under construction (Reality Remains in Play). But let’s be careful here—open systems most certainly don’t translate to “anything goes.” Within the virtual universe of OT or IT, every node is linked to a limited number of other nodes. You are presented with multiple options, to be sure, but they’re far from innumerable. More to the point, the finite array of choices actually restricts and focuses surfing activity (productively, one hopes), leading not to indeterminacy or chaos but rather to the flexible, rule-governed environment of variation within limits (Variation within Limits). In a sense, links between pathways serve as an index of idiomatic meaning in the oAgora and eAgora alike. Whether in oral tradition or on the Internet, you can’t go just anywhere, can you? Just like language—only more so (Proverbs), these networked media provide a platform for idiomatic exchange, for creating and maintaining a patterned logic at the same time that they fully support evermorphing reality. Pathways connect, but they don’t fossilize. First, imagine a storytelling event. . . . Every navigation depends on variables such as performer, audience, and the individual setting. Teller and listener(s) work their way through the story-network in tandem, with both sides reacting to the specificity of the moment against the much larger backdrop of linked alternatives. No two events can ever be “the same” in the sense that fixed texts are the same because that’s not the way the OT medium works. In the oAgora rule-governed flexibility, variation within...

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