Historicizing Hypertext and Web 2.0: Access, Governmentality and Cyborgs

Abstract

This article attempts to analyze the relation between individual, the machinic systems and capitalist ideology that gets more consolidated with the digital by looking closely at the ways in which the human–machine relation gets standardized through the ‘stabilization’ of technology in what is referred to as Web 2.0. Considering certain aspects of print culture that led to what Foucault refers to as the ‘principles of exclusion’—the way in which discourses delimit itself—the larger cultural economies that involved the production and manipulation of symbols in web is critically re-examined. The print-informed relation of individual and text finds its contemporary ramifications in our understanding and usage of hypertext as HTML. The article traces the crucial stages during the establishment of World Wide Web at the turn of the century and affects the question ‘What is a blogger’ in the same vein that the question ‘What is an Author’ was asked to trace the role that weblog format played in the constitution of ‘access’ to cyberspace. The larger implication of such an enquiry would be to situate ‘cyborg’ subjectivity as one that consolidates human identities as more textual, archived and accessible. The amalgamation of human–machine capacities through the stabilization of material technologies in the digital world concern the governmentality of bodies through HTML, its ideological significations and the praxis that led to its stabilization in the turn of the millennium.