Blam! prod. by Necro-Amalgamated (review)

Structuralist sense) instead of relying on their trowels and a familiarity with the subject material. The interpretation of aerial photographs is now part of the practice of archeology. Three of the essays theorise about the Internet in various ways. These are by Renear and Bilder ("Two Theses about the New Scholarly Communication "), Kaplan and Moulthrop ("Seeing through the Interface: Computers and the Future of Composition") and Landow ("Electronic Conferences and Samiszdat Textuality: The Example of Technoculture"). The first is typical of much writing on new technology in that it fails to acknowledge that what will happen in the future is not determined purely by the potential of technology (technological determinism abounds in this collection). It must be recognised that technology is, to a certain extent, socially constructed. In the context of the humanities, the technologies that will find a place are largely going to be those that connect to current practices and are thus "acceptable ." As Mark Olsen has recently pointed out, three decades of literary computing have failed to have any impact on literary criticism and scholarship and its results are rarely cited outside of the computing community. Computers are more likely to enter this area when humanistic rhetoric about its own projects and practices begins to change. Put simply and crudely, most workers in the humanities might be described as "behind the times." Kaplan and Moulthrop redress the balance somewhat, beginning with a quote: "The way we see things is effected by what we know or what we believe ." The potential effects of new media are recognised. They urge that "rhetoriticians and communications theorists should certainly be enfranchised in the decision making about what sort of mirror realities to build." They are concerned about the lack of recognition and acceptance of hypermedia as an object worthy of literary discourse. They examine the knowledge structures revealed in this "topographic and potentially interactive writing.... Alwaysopen to interventions and new arrangements and relationships , such texts require us to rethink what we mean by 'text,' suggesting that what we mean is less an object than an articulated social practice .... In our study of this emerging rhetoric of machine-mediated communication we need to reveal (or invent) ways in which a technological culture can envisage and revision the multitude of messages it produces. Our project calls for culturally and historically situated research encompassing both textual theory and practice." I Likewise, Landow examines the nature of these new textualities and the status of writing in electronic space. He uses his experience of "Technoculture," an electronic conference, as a case study. This is particularly interesting, as his liberal use of quotes captures the feel of "being in" an electronic conference debating these very matters. The main problem with any book on this subject is that it is barely published before it is dated. For example, Internet navigational tools such as Gopher and WAIS are described; however, World-Wide Web (which allows one to use the Internet as a hypertext) has been around since 1992 and is not mentioned. This must be particularly galling for Delaney and Landow, who have a particular interest in hypertext. However, this is obviously an inherent problem. Overall, the book may be categorised as a very wide-ranging collection of highly specialised articles that are probably only of interest to those whose work brushes against one of the constituent articles. COMPACT DISCINTERACTIVE PUBLICATION BLAM! produced by Necro-Amalgamated, P.O. Box 208, Village Station, NY 10014, U.S.A. $25.00 plus $2.50 postage. Reviewed fly Geoffrey Gaines, University of California,Berkeley, Space Sciences Laboratory , Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A. BLAM!, Necro Enema Amalgamated's premiere CD-I (compact disc-interactive ) magazine, is a collection of multimedia works for the electronically and mentally wired. On entering BLAM!, the user is ushered to a choice of gates through which random articles or advertisements may appear. A table of contents permits one to point to specific areas of the magazine . Each piece is presented in a stack of hypercards, with accompanying text, sound, and illustrations. There is nothing subtle or casual about BLAM!. From beginning to end it is an assault on the optic and aural nerve endings. Without adequate preparation...