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verbal marketplace but rather of multiple agoras. Second, may they conclude that real-time and asynchronous media, as diverse as they clearly are, both provide absolutely viable ways of making sense of the world. By accepting all three agoras and both kinds of media experience, our imagined ethnographers may just conclude that true, defensible democracy in media means tolerating and appreciating diversity in frame of reference. L Reality Remains in Play Three brands of experience “Call me Ishmael,” advises the narrator-character through whose voice we hear Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, a recognized masterpiece in the tAgora. Every edition of the novel ever published starts with exactly those three tWords (tWords) and no others, and every edition of that work (except for shortened, expurgated versions like the one I suffered through in high school) continues according to a uniquely plotted itinerary. We meet Queequeg the harpooner, Starbuck the first mate, Pip the eventually crazed cabin boy, and so many other memorable figures. And they act and interact in specific, definite ways not just on the first reading but on every reading. No alternate beginnings, middles, or ends; no variance in dialogue; no triumph for Ahab. If you’ve read the book once, you’ll recognize its trajectory point by point and scene by scene on the second pass, even more closely on the third pass, and so forth. Moby Dick is a singly authored, static, textual object; it will always be verbatim the same. Now consider how a South Slavic epic singer conducts his verbal business in the oAgora. For present purposes, let’s imagine he’s performing The Captivity of Alagić Alaja, a story-type that follows the familiar story line of Homer’s Odyssey, not to mention hundreds of stories from other cultures across the face of Europe and Asia. At every level, it exhibits and depends on variation within limits (Variation within Limits). He—and everyone who performs, has performed, or will perform this story—may or may not begin with a generic prologue (called a pripjev, or “presong”) before entering on the description of a miserable captive crying out from prison. That description may be bare-bones or highly detailed, and may involve a single prisoner or more than one. Negotiations for his or their release—undertaken because the noise is preventing his captor’s infant child from nursing and/or sleeping—may involve either the captor or his wife or both, and may be managed through an intermediary scribe or messenger or not. If you’ve heard the story once, you’ll recognize the general flow, but its particular shape in any given performance is highly contingent (Contingency). Since it’s emergent and depends on decisions to be made in real time, you can’t Reality Remains in Play . 203 even know whether the hero in prison will find his wife faithful (like the Penelope figure in the Odyssey story) or unfaithful (like the Clytemnestra figure in the Agamemnon story) when he arrives home after years of (mis)adventures. The South Slavic singer’s story is a performance borne of distributed authorship (Distributed Authorship); “it” can’t ever be verbatim the same. The eAgora offers a parallel, textless experience (and here as always we distinguish between the interactive exchange that is the soul of the Internet as against static eFiles that amount to pixel-texts circulating electronically as tAgora objects95 ). Engage your browser—and remember that even this startup page can morph or be replaced—and where do you go? Bookmarks might be a start, or a Google search, but from that point onward the journey depends wholly on the links you choose to click on, the ePathways (ePathways) you opt to follow or ignore. The itinerary builds in real time, not asynchronously, and cannot be foreordained, and it builds that way for everyone who surfs, has surfed, or will surf cognate ePathways (Real-time versus Asynchronous). Even when you have a specific purpose in mind, even when you aim to reproduce yesterday’s surfing expedition, you will always make different decisions about how to handle the alternatives built into the system (Systems versus Things). At every level, your experience exhibits and depends on variation within limits. No, you won’t do “just anything”; the eAgora, like the oAgora, is rule-governed and doesn’t support merely willy-nilly behavior (Not So Willynilly ). You can’t travel where there aren’t any pathways. And yes, you may have a generic idea of what you...

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