Gumbrecht and Marrinan 2003

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich and Michael Marrinan. Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

Roger Chartier, "From Mechanical Reproduction to Digital Representation" (109-113)

"Electronic representation of writing radically modifies the notion of contextualization, because it substitutes distribution in a logical architecture -- the software that organizes a database, electronic files or key words -- for the physical contiguity among texts put together in the same printed object. Electronic representation redefines the 'materiality' of the work by suppressing the physical tie between text and book (or any other printed object or manuscript) and by makign the reader -- rather than the author or the editor -- master of the cutting and apparance of the text. The entire system o fperceiving and manipulating texts is thus overturned, and the contemporary reader before a computer screen reassumes somewhat the posture of an ancient reader handling a voulmen, a scroll." (111)