Considering textual strategies one could regard traditional quotes as the functional equivalent of bridges, connecting separate scholarly productions and enabling the reader to cross into new territories. The procedure is well known. The culture of the written word rests on well-established means to refer from any given discursive context to different contexts available to the respective authors and readers alike. Multiple voices can be documented and scholarly disputes enacted by means of classical cross-references. It might even be said that the Humanities inhabit something like a ``common house of scholarship'', exhibiting a constantly changing pattern of ``neighbourhoods'' - and roadblocks. The advent of hypertext, however, is beginning to change the situation. It seems that simple spatial metaphors are insufficient to capture this phenomenon and that the way hypertext works has to be explained by a new kind of - technologically mediated - proximity.
Ordinary books ask their readers to supply the expertise necessary to handle footnotes. The ``Web'', on the other hand, provides an elementary protocol in order to automatically translate certain expressions in the source code of a document into a ``link'', referring the user to another point in electronically accessible space. Quotes used to trigger a reader's associations, which subsequently could be followed up by some activity on part of the reader, e.g. looking up the reference and making up one's mind concerning the issues involved. This is not - ordinarily - the way hyper-textual reference works. The connections established by ``Uniform Resource Locators'' are at the same time more immediate and more detached from subjective agency than established footnotes.
If everything works as it should, any reference (text, picture, sound) is just ``one click away''. It should not matter whether the destination-document resides on a local hard disk or on a computer in another continent. This global immediacy dramatically changes the meaning of ``information exchange'' and forces a review on what ``reasonable discourse'' might amount to. Yet, there are many restrictions on networking operations that fall entirely outside a person's control as my initial example shows. Taking advantage of enhanced communicational opportunities we cannot but incur the pitfalls of the new technologies. My point is that both aspects (the promise and the drawbacks) work together to change the established patterns of intra- and interdepartmental knowledge transfer. To put it as a motto: When looking at Austro-Hungarian relations try to imagine them as hyper-links: embedded in a global network, conveniently close at hand, incredibly fast and easily broken.
Constructing hypertext links as analogous to footnotes is misleading for an additional reason. In traditional scholarship footnotes are just pointers to different textual corpora which remain outside the material context defined by a single book. There is, indeed, a ``world of books'', but its items are not intrinsically connected. All the relevant connections are imposed upon the texts by their users. In electronic networking automatic linkage of digitally stored informational units and data-processing by software (web-crawlers, robots, spiders etc.) is an essential feature.
To bring out the difference, compare the following three examples: the weekly listing of events in the local newspaper, an automated telephone-switchboard and a web-link. Usually the newspaper announcement of some movie or theatrical performance will include a telephone number to reserve tickets. In one respect, this procedure closely resembles the activity of looking up a quote. The newspaper entry functions as a sign mediating between to different realms. But a phone, obviously, is technologically more advanced than a conventional textual suggestion, so there is a second aspect to consider. The operations of digital switchboards do not in any way depend on a semiotic praxis. It is a matter of the functioning of certain circuits whether a connection is established. Calling the ticket-line is, consequently, a composite phenomenon, including conscious human decision and automated execution of some digital processes.
Now, in a Web-link these two components are blended into a new kind of mediation. Such a link retains something of classical reference via footnotes insofar as the user has to ``decide'' to follow its suggestion. But it also immerses her into the electronic automatism operational under the conventional surface. Thinking and electronic switching are joined into a tele-communicative event the characteristics of which cannot be reduced to either unaided personal activity or functional automatisms. We are familiar with many devices that work in semi-automatic ways, loudspeakers or power-assisted steering-wheels being just two examples. Very little theoretical work addresses these issues. The peculiarities of the linking-procedure I have been pointing out are easily lost between proclamations of global digital accessibility of data and rearguard actions to preserve a humanistic position.
Small communities, located at the periphery of hegemonic centres, face considerable difficulties in adapting their understanding of themselves and their environment to changes initiated by external forces. I have been suggesting that using the metaphor of bridges is an indication of peripheral status as far as Budapest and Vienna are concerned. And I attempted to show that the rhetoric of Austro-Hungarian neighbourhood runs the danger of locking itself into nostalgic propaganda. Changing metaphors changes one's outlook on the world. Computer-assisted hypertext browsing is a recent development, synthesising human agency and network protocols. In trying to imagine how the two cities might relate to each other, hypertext might be an attractive paradigm, particularly in view of the fact that the cooperative framework at hand joins computer scientists and philosophers.
For such an enquiry to succeed it does not suffice to linearly add philosophical and technical contributions. If we are dealing with a genuinely new phenomenon, we must not allow its analysis to break up into reading the manuals and doing cultural studies. There is an urgent need to inter-weave the competence of system administrators and historians of ideas. On the face of it the working team of engineers and theoreticians assembled within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian project is off to a good start. Let me, however, conclude with a warning.
Some engineers try hard to come up with a philosophy and the philosophers, struggling with the technical apparatus, try hard to compensate for their partial inferiority by pushing into ever higher levels of cognitive abstraction. Substantial progress could be made if technicians were able to present their problems in such a way that philosophers might gain insight into them - and vice versa. To pick an easy example: I entertain some thoughts about the characteristics of hyper-links and I expect software-developers to teach me about their implementations. This will certainly enrich my theory. Cultural and technological advances are by no means guaranteed to promote each other. At best they are hypothetically linked.
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