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From a polytactic perspective, the response is obvious. To circumscribe knowledge , art, and ideas via tAgora-specific strategies is to reduce living complexity to a collection of manageable but highly artificial facsimiles. Clive James knows this, and he demonstrates it in Cultural Amnesia. Wallace Stevens knew it when he created “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,”91 a kind of white paper on polytaxis or, for that matter, a kind of polytaxis on white paper. Stevens had it right—there isn’t just one way; there are at least 13. And James has it right—A-to-Z order is merely nominal; we need to find more meaningful (if less conventional) links. In Pathways Project language, reality remains in play. L Proverbs Real proverbs serve as behavioral guides in various societies, providing generic, time-tested perspectives on the apparent chaos of everyday life. In this node we’ll offer a group of homemade, entirely nontraditional proverbs to help recall how the oAgora and eAgora share similar dynamics (Disclaimer). Originally formulated for understanding OT, these eight “pearls of wisdom” also speak to transactions in the virtual marketplace of IT. Several of the proverbs appear without change from their original form.92 Others have been slightly modified to accommodate Internet technology alongside oral tradition (Agora Correspondences). 1. OT and IT work like language, only more so. Both media are special cases of language, with additional, denser coding to support the enhanced functionality of each medium. OT uses structural patterning at many levels— phraseology, narrative, story-type, and so forth. IT employs its own set of structures and specialized codes with which programmers and webdesigners create systems of pathways for web-surfers to navigate through. Each technology depends for its efficacy on a dedicated register—that is, a rule-governed way of speaking or expressing. 2. OT and IT are very plural media. Just as oral traditions dwarf literary works in number and diversity, so the Internet offers us an unprecedented inventory and variety of sites and experiences. Furthermore, no OT or IT ever holds still; everything is constantly varying within limits, taking on one “new” shape after another. Unlike the fixed, tangible items that serve as currency in the tAgora, OT and IT simply can’t be confined to a single, stable, counterplural form without the enforced euthanasia of textualization (Resynchronizing the Event). The central truth of both morphing technologies is that reality remains in play (Reality Remains in Play). Proverbs . 191 3. Performance makes it happen, while idiom provides the context. OT depends on performance for its continuing existence; action and involvement —surfing through a network of possibilities—are the hallmarks of the oAgora, and even lie at the root of oral-derived texts as well. Likewise, actually negotiating the ePathways of the Internet (ePathways) is the necessary precondition to making meaning in that arena. Nothing happens in either medium until the performer/surfer begins the journey, and the evolving itinerary is always potential until that same performer/surfer codetermines it through a tiered sequence of decisions. OT and IT can happen only in the oArena (Arena of Oral Tradition) and eArena (Arena of the Web), respectively. And just as performance drives reality in OT and IT, so both technologies depend on embedded idiomatic implications for their core communication . OT encodes its surface with “more than meets the eye” in terms of traditional, more-than-literal, add-on meanings. A phrase, a gesture, even the performer’s costume may harbor whole reservoirs of associated signification. Likewise, IT offers links, portals, clusters of sites, and other emergent, interactive strategies that lead the surfer beyond the immediate and the literal to a richer constellation of implied possibilities (Systems versus Things). Navigating along established but multiply interconnected pathways (always according to the surfer’s own initiative) opens up the implied context. Meaning is engaged idiomatically. 4. OT and IT work through rather than in spite of their coding. Largely because we are accustomed to analyzing communication textually, we instinctively try to understand OT and IT through a tAgora lens. Another way to say the same thing is to observe that we are often victims of the agoraphobia (Agoraphobia) and culture shock (Culture Shock) induced by having to manage unfamiliar ways of thinking and communicating . But if we shift our default perspective and confront the oAgora and eAgora on their own terms, then the specialized coding that seems so strange or artificial will make much more sense. That coding, as Lawrence Lessig93 puts it...

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