Avatars of the word: from papyrus to cyberspace

interprets new communications technologies and their social effects by comparing the present moment to a series of earlier, historically congruent moments of technological transition. The book is informally divided into two parts: the first five chapters present a number of historical snapshots, each of which is subsequently related to technological changes in our own time, and the last four chapters discuss college-level teaching and learning in the context of new communications technologies (p. x). Both parts offer a number of opportunities for reflection. Four brief textual interludes called "hyperlinks" are scattered throughout the book, and allow O'Donnell to pursue ideas generated in the main discussion (i.e., texual instability, nonlinearity, ownership of ideas, and teaching). O'Donnell's reading of various moments of technological transition, from speech to writing (on papyrus), from writing to the codex book, from manuscript to movable type, attempts to show how the "new" has always depended on the "old" for its identity. In the case of the Internet, for example, O'Donnell says that some of the most radical claims made on behalf of electronic texts are in fact centuries old: notions of textual instability, non-linear reading practices (hypertextuality), and the "virtual" are attributes of other forms of communication as well, most notably handwritten and printed texts. Because he rejects a view of technological history predicated on a series of ruptures or clean breaks with the past, O'Donnell mobilizes a number of examples in which the past is employed to authorize the present (p. 3). New communications technologies do not simply "supplant" older forms of communication ; they "supplement" them (p. ix). For example, in his reading of Plato's Phaedrus, O'Donnell calls Socrates' "idealization of one form of communication [i.e., speech over writing]. .. unrealistic" (p. 22) because it fails to recognize not only how Socratic culture relied on multiple media but also how Socrates' conception of speech was already a product of a culture influenced by writing. In the case of the "virtual library" (Ch. 2), O'Donnell traces the fantasy of instantaneous access all the way back to the introduction of the book (p. 32), which in effect turns the dream of a virtual future into an attempt to realize "a future that will be just like the past, only better and faster" (p. 42). In the concluding chapter of his book (Ch. 9), O'Donnell models this view by merging himself as cyberguide-i.e., one who has been "consciously …