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into a unique version of a unique story, a master text repeated verbatim forever. Em-booked and nonmorphing, effectively “writ in stone.” Likewise, without the hands-on flexibility and generativity of the system that supports navigation of the web, the eAgora would cease to function. Its complex route map would collapse into a single one-way street. Hypertext would devolve into a predetermined, invariable sequence with sharply curtailed power to support exploration and representation. Oral performances and Internet performances would become mere texts, mere dead letters. Open-ended but also rule-governed Systems draw their power from an interactive combination of open-endedness and rule-governed behavior. Systems provide users with a frame and a set of techniques within which individuals can create a series of unique instances (Variation within Limits). And because systems are both open-ended and rulegoverned , rather than only one or the other, works created within them are both original and intelligible. You aren’t slave to a system in the oAgora or eAgora, but neither can you do “just anything.” You have to play the game by the rules. The best analogy is simply language itself, of which OT and IT are highly coded special cases. After all, language operates by balancing the flexibility that fosters creativity with the grammatical, lexical, and idiomatic forms that together provide the vehicle. Subtract that flexibility and language fossilizes, loses its human usefulness altogether. Subtract the grammatical, lexical, and idiomatic forms and anarchy ensues; no one will be able to communicate with anyone else. But meld the two together, combining the ability to morph with systemic rules for allowable variation, and the possibilities for expression become inexhaustible. Proverbially speaking, OT and IT work like language, only more so (Proverbs). L tAgora: Exchanging Tangible Goods An agora is a verbal marketplace (Agora As Verbal Marketplace), a site for creation and exchange of knowledge, art, and ideas. The Pathways Project recognizes three agoras, or arenas for human communication (Three Agoras). This node is devoted to the textual arena, the tAgora. The negotiable currency of exchange in the tAgora is tWords (tWords)—written or printed or onscreen bytes of information that we identify by inserting white space between them and enshrining them in dictionaries. Unlike oWords (oWords), which are spoken, heard, and physically embodied, tWords promote and enable asynchronous communication (Real-time versus Asynchronous), 238 . Systems versus Things whether they’re scratched on the back of an envelope, etched in gold on a wedding invitation, or configured in Unicode-mapped pixels within an email or text message. You participate in the textual marketplace by swapping tangible items that reach beyond exclusive embedding in a single moment or event. These tBytes promise, uniquely, to free you from “right now” involvement and to convey hard, invariable facts (Just the Facts) when and where you or others want to use them—as long as you can get your hands on these textual marvels, of course. Disembodied transmission So how does that miracle of disembodied transmission happen? Well, the textually mediated environment (Disclaimer) essentially removes the defining constraints of space and time. Entrust your ideas to a text (Texts and Intertextuality) and they go offline, so to speak. Exchange can happen without the online connections that drive activities in the oAgora (Online with OT) and eAgora, and it can take place anywhere and anytime that the artifact is physically available. The sender inscribes, and the receiver asynchronously reads what’s inscribed— one letter after another; one tWord after another; one paragraph, page, and text after another. Put in Pathways Project terms, the cognitive and technological prosthesis of tWords supports the illusion of object (Illusion of Object). Not insignificantly, that same prosthesis reinforces the cultural fiction of objective reality (Reality Remains in Play), a deeply embedded fantasy that has empowered so many of Homo sapiens’ achievements since the relatively recent invention of writing (Homo Sapiens’ Calendar Year). Instead of the allconsuming , ever-emergent oAgora event that vanishes as soon as the event is over, or the eAgora website that has morphed significantly since your aggregator last checked it, the tAgora fosters communication via what we take as permanent, immutable artifacts. And because those artifacts aren’t subject to built-in contingencies shared by the other two agoras (Contingencies), texts can deliver the message the inscriber intends—exactly, verbatim, with no slippage. What’s more, it will be precisely the same message every time, delivered according to the reader/user’s terms and timetable. You can choose to...

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