The major purpose of this book is to illustrate and explain the
fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind's oldest
and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the Internet.
Despite superficial differences, both technologies are radically alike
in depending not on static products but rather on continuous processes,
not on "What?" but on "How do I get there?" In contrast to the fixed
spatial organization of the page and book, the technologies of oral
tradition and the Internet mime the way we think by processing along
pathways within a network. In both media it's pathways--not things--that
matter. To illustrate these ideas, this volume is designed as a
"morphing book," a collection of linked nodes that can be read in
innumerable different ways. Doing nothing less fundamental than
challenging the default medium of the linear book and page and all that
they entail, Oral Tradition and the Internet shows readers that there
are large, complex, wholly viable, alternative
worlds of media-technology out there--if only they are willing to
explore, to think outside the usual, culturally constructed categories.
This "brick-and-mortar" book exists as an extension of
The Pathways Project (http: //pathwaysproject.org), an open-access
online suite of chapter-nodes, linked websites, and multimedia all
dedicated to exploring and demonstrating the
dynamic relationship between oral tradition and Internet technology
