During the sixties, Marshall McLuhan wrote his The Gutenberg Galaxy, where he announced

that the linear way of thinking instaured by the invention of the press, was on the verge of being

substituted by a more global way of perceiving and understanding through the TV images or

other kinds of electronic devices. If not Mc Luhan, certainly many of his readers pointed their

finger first to a Manhattan Discotheque and then to a printed book by saying "this will kill that."

The media needed a certain time to accept the idea that our civilization was on the verge of

becoming an image oriented one - which would have involved a decline of literacy. Nowadays

this is a common shibboleth for every weekly magazine. What is curious is that the media started

to celebrate the decline of literacy and the overwhelming power of images just at the moment in

which, in the world scene, appeared the Computer.

Certainly a computer is an instrument by means of which one can produce and edit images,

certainly instructions are provided by means of icons; but it is equally certain that the computer

has become, first of all, an alphabetic instrument. On its screen there run words, lines, and in

order to use a computer you must be able to write and to read. The new computer generation is

trained to read at an incredible speed. An old-fashioned university professor is today incapable

of reading a computer screen at the same speed as a teen-ager. These same teen-agers, if by

chance they want to program their own home computer, must know, or learn, logical procedures

and algorithms, and must type words and numbers on a keyboard, at a great speed.

In this sense one can say that the computer made us to return to a Gutenberg Galaxy.

People who spend their night implementing an unending Internet conversation are principally

dealing with words. If the TV screen can be considered a sort of ideal window through which

one watches the whole world under the form of images, the computer screen is an ideal book

on which one reads about the world in form of words and pages.

The classical computer provided a linear sort of written communication. The screen was

displaying written lines. It was like a fast-reading book.

But now there are hypertexts. In a book one had to read from left to right (or right to left, or up

to down, according to different cultures) in a linear way. One could obviously skip through the

pages, one - once arrived at page 300 - could go back to check or re-read something at page 10 -

but this implied a labor, I mean, a physical labor. On the contrary a hypertext is a

multidimensional network in which every point or node can be potentially connected with any

other node.

Thus we have arrived at the final chapter of our this-will-kill-that story. It is more and more

stated that in the near future hypertextual Cd-roms will replace books.

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