Cybertextuality

Literary/ Cultural Context Essay

Ian Lancashire (University of Toronto)
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  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

Cybertextuality is any theory of text, and of mental and physical functions associated with text, that is based on Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which theorizes any utterance (whether by human, animal, or machine) as being governed by bidirectional controls, consisting of both a sender’s message and a receiver’s feedback. A “hand-shake” mechanism with reader-receivers enables an author-sender to revise and re-transmit a noise-obscured or otherwise faulty message before moving on to another utterance. For example, email systems today use a cryptographic hash function or a lesser checksum, attached to each byte-packet, whose calculation at the point of receipt of the message will show whether any part of the message has been …

1299 words

Citation: Lancashire, Ian. "Cybertextuality". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 16 January 2009 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=5770, accessed 24 November 2024.]

5770 Cybertextuality 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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