Hypermedia is usually defined as the grouping of varied media types within a digitized matrix, making it more dynamic than just text with hypertext links. This grouping is enabled by transposing the disparat media types into a digital formate which is then the technical common denomenator. A web page must present disparate media elements, each in turn, in relief. A video clip, a sound file, a chunk of text, a graphic or an animation, all of which can be seen or heard, will collectively generate a thematic. This thematic constitutes the intellectual meaning of the work which is conceptual rather than tangible. It defines a set of questions that frame the relations of the new media objects or cultural units within a more general cultural referent system. In this mannor new media can be structured to produce purposful communication in accord with the technical infrastucture of computers and the internet. Purposful however is not an abstraction. The communication here needs to and can be in human terms.

     As a hypermedia document, a web site or group of inter-related web pages clearly works simultaneously along both a temporal or sequential axis and in series along a spatial axis. Information is gleaned from a spatial exploration of the page as iconic and from it's indexical relation with the previous or next pages. Also within the media ellements on the page some are more iconic like photographs and some more sequential like video clips or sounds.

    Hypermedia should not be an insipid compromise favoring any particular media element with the others only in support. Rather it should be the result of constructing a matrix in which the varied media elements support a harmonious realization of a shared thematic. This needs to be a dynamic mosaic with both indexical and iconic dimensions. The multiple media types constituting this need to express their contributions to the thematic in their unique media specific terms. To accomplish this the page design needs to allow each element to stand in the spotlight for the duration of its statement. The web page is not just a cardboard box full of new media ellements, it is a stage.

    The terms icon and index are used loosely here, as are the binary parameters of signs, metaphor and metonym defined by Jacobson. The icon defines spatial relations while index is experienced as temporal relations.

    Given substance as new media objects embedded in a hypermedia document they function as the signifier/signified objects called signs by Barthe. In accord with his theory of imbrication from "Mythologies" and also with reference to Eisenstein's montage theory, they generate a higher order signification that is unseen but conceptual. This is named contemporary mythology with Barthe or intellectual montage with Eisenstein.

    With hypermedia the higher order signification is a conceptual symbolic structure or thematic generated by the tangible signs, the new media objects. This thematic is a set of framing attitudes and relationships which define the relevant questions concerning the subject of the work. Each new media ellement in the work makes it's unique contribution to this concept. There is no predjudice in favor of print culture on the internet.

    The purpose of this paper is to help define a new-media language in order to construct purposeful hypermedia communications. This should provide theory to guide experimentation; guide what Lev Manovich terms, "systematic, laboratory-like research into its elements and basic compositional, expressive, and generative strategies...focusing on determining the new-media equivalent of a shot, sentence, word, or even letter" (Manovich 15). The media referred to here have in common that they are inherently sequential, film or print. New-media is inherently dynamic, not specifically sequential. It includes any media that can be digitized: still photographs, graphics and audio clips for example. Old media, when digitized and placed within a digital matrix, constitute new media ellements which are also changed by their recontextualization as computer data. (Manovich transformation?)

    Hypermedia can be said to be constituted by the structuring of disparate new media objects that are its smallest unit of information. Media objects can be seen, heard, or perhaps even have their texture sensed. Their generated meanings or referent signify a higher order of meaning not sensed but phenomenologically transcendent or conceptual.

    In isolation each new media object of a web site generates its own meaning. A photograph tends to work by opposition in series within a continuous space, as icon. It defines its meaning in terms of selecting relations according to similarity, as this rather than that category of object. An element of time based media like a video or sound clip will generate its contribution to the thematic in terms of temporal proximity or sequential relations, as index, or by suggesting causal relations.

    While the media specific characteristics of each disparate media object will each have a dominant ability this is not absolute. A photograph can easily suggest a moment from a sequence and a film can have a meaning as static visual space. Signs have an ability to work simultaneously along a spatial and temporal axis.

    Given a dominant focus or denotation like the indexical revelation of some causal relation, a video clip can at the same time have a degree of meaning as icon. It might, for example, contribute some nuance of meaning connotatively to the meaning of a juxtaposed graphic on a web page.

    Simultaneously, these discrete media objects are contextualized by inclusion in the field of the whole page with all its other new media objects. These grouped and thus interrelated media objects are the smallest unit of information of hypermedia and are the signs generating the thematic: the inquiry defining the relations of the referent system it produces. As visible hypermedia objects they interact as signifiers to generate a set of motif's with more complex meaning. Each one as an iconic or indexical sign is tangible but together they generate the intangible intellectual meaning of the hypermedia document's thematic.

    Applying the model of sign production from Umberto Eco it is possible to deal with varied media types. From all of our senses we filter signifiers that characterize experience from the totality of our perception. Then we use them to represent that experience in culture by mapping copies of them, in the form of language or other media representations, within a structured conceptual symbol or semiotic model (Eco 255).

    We perceive in terms of both our predefined cultural referent system, selecting from perception what we think we should see, and induct new un-transformed experience into it (Eco 248). This constitutes the symbolic language of culture. A single hypermedia object on a web page typically constitutes its theme in this way, producing a referent that is given a greater meaning by the relations of the symbol structure that we place it within.

    In Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Peter Wollen defines the code of cinema in terms of, "...that which Peirce called 'the second trichotomy of signs'....'A sign is either an icon, an index or a symbol. 'Wollen 122)" Wollen points out that, "Peirce did not consider them mutually exclusive...all three aspects...overlap and are co-present" (Wollen 123). The symbol is considered to be more arbitrary and abstract than an iconic or an indexical sign. This places it at odds with the apparent realism of photography.

    Wollen states, "In the cinema, it is quite clear, indexical and iconic aspects are by far the most powerful. The symbolic is limited and secondary (Wollen 140)." This is based on the ontologically naive literate prejudice that language is arbitrarily coded while photographic representations are traditionally considered to be only mirror images of reality.

    The sound objects of spoken language are as much arbitrary representations of reality as the shadow people of silent films. Certainly layering over this with the further abstraction of writing extends speech and makes it more abstract. It's consequent loss of emotional content is similar to the loss effected by abstracting a motif in painting.

    This does not really place it in a different category of sign; rather it simply abstracts the sign. The over-order of signification, the referent or referent system, is still a phenomenologically transcendent order of symbol structure like intellectual montage or mythology.

    In cinema the symbolic structure is not absent. Rather, it is the objective of Eisenstein's montage theory to produce an abstract intangible intellectual montage from concrete images and sound representations. This intellectual montage collates readily with Barthe's mythology. The overtonal montage is similar to the connotative aspect.

    It can readily be seen that a photographed or filmed representation of an object is not naive or transparent. No camera ever took a picture. The photographer always expresses a point of view at the expense of the object arbitrarily recorded.

    To borrow from a concept of Sergi Eisenstein, the lower but perceivable layers of meaning generate an arbitrary and unseen overtonal and intellectual montage (Eisenstein, Film Sense 69). In contrast to the presumption of veracity implied in Vertov's theory of ‘Kino Eye’ Eisenstein intended to engage in the political discourse of ‘Kino Fist’.

    It is possible to use the term the symbol, rather than as being a privileged 'more arbitrary' peer to icon and index, as being an intangible thematic structure that is constituted by the signs that generate it. Here it is a linguistic reality which mirrors the conceptual process.

    Roland Barthes states that, "...for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of marking, photographs are signs which don't take" (Barthes 6). He argues that, "The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent" (Barthes 80). In Camera Lucida he compared it with a Greek death mask to indicate that it has an essential value as proof, "...this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it" (Barthes 115).

    Cameras using mirrors and optical lenses don't take pictures though, people do. People never see only that this was or is. They always have a point of view, a location in their private gestalt. The pictures they take always state categorically that this was seen. ...THUS. There is no possibility of naive realism.

    Like any cultural object photographs must have codes. Certainly they try to mirror the real order within their technical limitations, but for that to happen someone has to position the frame edge and trigger an exposure at a specific moment. It is not just a record of proximal vision. This selects and arranges a perspective; this analyses and persuades. This process semiotically enriches and privileges a perception.

    Wollen wrote, "The true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them" (Wollen 16). This structuralist first principal allows all forms of media representation in culture to be considered as signifiers, specifically the iconic and indexical signs of photographs and film.

    The positioning of the frame edge in photography, film or video defines the relations of the objects within the frame and implies the point of view of the perceiver. Just a surely as if a sculptor was at work on a stone this FRAMING chisels out a message from the series of possible meanings where there was none before. The form attributed to a motif, which results from this selection and arrangement, which exists nowhere else and has no meaning outside itself, is the missing codifying MARK. This determines the arbitrary meaning of the still image.

    This is fundamentally different from constructing meaning by positioning significant marks with time-based media like sound or video clips. The positioning of film or sound clips to form a sequence in time is more readily seen as being a selecting and arraigning in order to frame a meaning. But in a photograph as well as with a single web page meaning is constructed dynamically with a simultaneous series.

    All the new media objects on a web page are co-present. Potentially they all 'speak' at once and without an over-arching structure they do. Also, they simultaneously interact to define each other's meaning by contextualization. They form series, or chains of signifiers, that give at least tonal variation to each other's signifieds.

    So what then is a hypermedia equivalent to the filmic structural unit, the sequence? This has to be the product of grouping smaller units like the separate shots of a film sequence. The smallest unit of information of hypermedia is the discrete new media object seen or heard on the web page. The next meaningful unit of information would, by analogy to film, be a set of the smaller units with a common purpose like a film sequence. In the more dynamically arranged web site this seems to be a web page with its common thematic and made up of its discrete media objects. Next a grouping of these web pages, as being like sets of filmic sequences, constitutes the larger unit of information, the web site as being like a film.

    Commonly large or complicated sites will have an intermediary unit in the form of relatively independent sub-sections of their total web site, like part 1 and 2 of a book. These sections are usually organized as sets of web pages that each have a sub-set of supporting web pages unified by a private menu but with the main page linked to the menu system of the complete web site.

    But unlike the hot continuous stream of information presented by film, or the predetermined iconic relations of a photograph, a dynamic web site has an element of PAUSE that is crucial to its reading. The viewer is not forced to see one element after another in a rapid or predetermined succession.

    The hypermedia reader may by various strategies be encouraged to follow a path but is never constrained to. They each respond uniquely or read uniquely because they have the space before them and the time to do so. There is space to pause and reflect between each media object. As with the oriental YinYang this adds a more passive dimension to the western habit of excessively sequential thinking.

    Structualist give various names to higher order signifiers. Barthe lets them float above the tangible signifiers of a page as connotative meaning generating a second order of signification, like Eisentein's overtonal and intellectual montage. In accord with Umberto Echo's theory here the term sign will mean the tangible signifier like a new media object and symbol structure as the conceptual meaning generated by groups of signs. This does not quite collate with Pierce's use of the terms icon, index and symbol but here I will persist in using icon for sign in series and index for sign in sequence then reserving the term symbol for their conceptual meaning structure, the thematic.

    With film the sequence of reading is determined. This gives the author control of the reading if not the interpretation of the work. With the simultaneous presence characteristic of new media objects on a dynamic web site this is not the case. Web page readers enter and leave sites unpredictably.

    As a consequence there is a tradition of authoring web pages, and hypertext novels, that do not depend on the user having ever seen another of the sites pages, including the 'home page'. Similarly there is a structuralist principle that requires a work to be readable in any direction from any point. Presuming that the reader sees every page of the site the same information will be acquired regardless of navigation path.

    Another general principle emerging from the new social relations enabled by the internet is that there is no voice of authority. Past are the days of, "It is true because it is written." Web authoring is more like letter writing than discourse. All voices tend to be equal.

    There is no final say. Even pretentious web works refer to other independent works through links. It is inherently a many to many discussion rather than an authoritative discourse. Hypertext authors consider the reader to be unpredictable and thus that the work cannot depend upon prior knowledge of a web site node or page.

    For example here is a reference taken from a related web site which may or may not still be there in the shifting sands of the web:

...as the author writes a new chapter, he does

not know the reader's cognitive state because

he does not know the exact order in which the

chapters have been read.

- "http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/~teaching/students/jude/blog_archive/000117.html Jude's Blog

    According to this principle, information in a hypermedia document needs to be grouped on pages that are independent of others except for a thematic coherence. These pages can be arrayed in series relative to each other rather than being necessarily sequential.

    More practically there remains a necessity for sequential reading of many works that cannot be grouped as series of one page sections, hence the persistence of 'Previous' and 'Next' links.

    But, the point remains valid that even pages in sequence are read separately and require dynamic structuring in to make them coherent. They need to be composed like collage and montage simultaneously.

    It is possible and even desirable to design a group of related web pages without a necessary sequence.

    An extreme example of a site without sequence would be a series of photographs on a common theme. Five grouped web pages, each with a picture of a movie star, would not be causally or sequentially related. In this instance the web site would be connected as a series of icons articulating a common theme and its sequential dimension would be weak, allowing it easily to be read in any order. There are no necessary causal relations between the elements of the site. Also, there is no necessity to have seen any of the other pages to fully understand an individual one.

    Since a web site is unable to control the entry and exit points of readers this weak sequential reading is characteristic and necessary. The variable navigation path taken by site users effectively generates different versions of a site according to Manovich (38).

     A single web page tends to be primarily iconic, a spatially defined communication similar to collage. Even the data of an entire site, or the whole internet, can be thought of as being simultaneously accessible. Lev Manovich defines this as a database form (35). The elements in it can be considered in series, that is in terms of how similar or different they are from each other. As a database front end a web page author has the ability to shift meaning subtly by shifting one element for another slightly varied one. Similarly a reader can shift nuance of interpretation and can change context by choosing a different navigation path.

    Simultaneously this reading experience is still at least weakly sequential. The eye moves from one discrete element to another in sequence on a page that can also be seen all at once. On web pages it is also possible to scroll to see previously hidden sections. This allows a possibility of narrative suspense based on information being revealed in time.

    It is also possible for a web site to rely primarily on a strong sequential reading. This is similar to film montage where action unfolds with a necessary sequence. Time is the dominant consideration. Here the iconic dimension is subordinate or weak. This requires the user to navigate from a start page through to an end page. Often text content is treated this way to prevent the reader from having to scroll down. After one screen of text there is a previous and next button to guide navigation. The amount of advertising that is often seen to the right and left of a central text column indicates that in this example the spatial dimension is still active even if the sequential is dominant.

    So while neither exclusively temporal montage nor spatial collage, to be effective hypermedia needs to utilize the definitive characteristics of all the media types of its elements. Efficiency of communication is best realized by exploiting the media specific characteristics of each disparate element. The iconic photograph can describe, linear text states abstraction that can't be seen, headings define structure, temporal sound clips give the emotion of speech, and sequential video clips show events where meaning unfolds in time. Each element has unique capabilities to exploit.

     However open to independent navigation by readers, each disparate new media object needs to have its turn at center stage. They each in turn need to step out from the white noise of the real order to make relevant comment. Below is a brief set of ideas for providing temporary dominance to a page element.

* Determine sequence by having buttons or links suggest start, navigation path and stop.
* Segregation on the page isolated in white space and the time of the sequence of the eye scanning.
* Contain in a floating frame, use borders and margins, or colored areas of page to emphasize segregation and provide a hierarchy of importance.
* Place an image or other element in a pop-up frame to foreground it when user clicks on a trigger. When the user is finished and clicks it off the focus returns to the originating page.
* Control reading sequence by layout - exploiting balance, size, color and movement.
* Time based elements like animated gifs, video clips or audio clips run one at a time then stop and release dominate focus. The user can trigger these.
* Scrolling from the top half to the bottom will shift attention in time.
* Use a menu and navigation system to enable the user to choose the path.


    This kind of technique does not guarantee the production of a coherent global statement, but it does enable it. It is as with the data processing expression, "garbage in garbage out." To not be chaotic the individual element's statements contributing to the global thematic have to intend to be intelligent and relevant. The discerning of global meaning is also a responsibility of the reader.

    The disparate media types, which constitute hypermedia elements, can be considered as extensions of the native human senses. Just as the senses are given a potential for synergy by reference to the central nervous system so the extended senses are enabled for synergy in what McLuhan called the electric extended nervous system. (McLuhan, Understanding Media 302)

    Currently the ability to do this is based on the common denominator of digitizing all information so they all are compatible within an electronic matrix. As Manovich puts it, "All existing media are translated into numerical data accessible for the computer. The result: graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts become computable, that is, simply sets of computer data. In short, media becomes new media." (Manovich 25) This multiplies the functions of computers. "No longer just a calculator, control mechanism, or communication device, the computer becomes a media processor." (Manovich 25) That is to say, multi-sensual.

    Humans can't read the 1's and 0's of the electronic byte any better than we can read the electrical discharges of our nerves. We require a conceptual competence for this. In terms of the nervous system extended through the web this means transposing digitized data into human readable language. At first the net was barely able to do this using 'ascii' text, where an alphabetic term has an equivalent numerical term that a machine can express as digital bites. Now any data type including video can be translated into digitized information and displayed on a web page.

    Why bother interpreting our experience through multiple media types? Susan Sontag comments on Proust's view of photography, "Whenever Proust mentions photographs, he does so disparagingly: as a synonym for a shallow, too exclusively visual, merely voluntary relation to the past, whose yield is insignificant compared with the deep discoveries to be made by responding to cues given by all the senses-the technique he called 'involuntary memory.'" This suggests the effect of synergy on the senses on our conceptualization, or rather the detrimental effect of utilizing a single sense exclusively. Extending this to the realm of our extended senses and culture the synergy of multiple extended senses or media types enhances our perception. Conversely, to rely on a single dominant media, whether print of television, is inherently detrimentally reductionist. [ Sontag p.164 ]

    To process this data into a purposeful communication requires further structuring. A web page full of assorted media types would be a container of junk otherwise, as would a collection of varied sense data without the mediation of the nervous system and cultural competence of the mind.

    Each media type, as an extension of a specific human sense, has sufficient technical integrity to be read on a web page in isolation. A significant mark within this which helps constitutes a media object by itself belongs as a unit of that discrete element not of the hypermedia. The complete and separate new-media objects are the basic irreducible units of hypermedia. Similar to our natural proximal sense data in relation to our minds they require structuring to transform their specific statements into a globally synergetic and coherent communication.

     But, having an extended nervous system in the form of a digital matrix only gives the technical possibility for a new type of communication. A conceptual competence in the form of a higher order symbol structure is necessary to make it a purposeful statement, beyond a random assortment of elements.

    One of the first problems with text only hypertext is being unable not to get lost wandering from link to link. The web is inherently without hierarchy, a many to many media. This inability to focus on a specific message can be likened to a pre-mirror phase infant being unable to discern coherent relations.

    Hypertext breaks the train of thought without providing a new significant structure. A user clicks from a topic to topic like a hungry grasshopper. As often as not the referring links are to completely different web sites with little in common. The only unifying principal is the user. The randomness of this does not encourage in depth exploration of a theme. Similarly hypermedia is incomprehensible without an over arching structure.

    New media objects are the smallest unit of hypermedia when they are bound as discrete communications to the development of a common thematic. The symbolic architecture of this is that each self-contained disparate new media object on a page is a sign whose meaning or referent, when thematically synchronized with other page elements, collectively constitutes an unseen or unheard symbolic statement or global theme. These elements as signs refer to the global symbol structure for coherence and authentication, not to each other or to 'reality'.

    In a letter to Harold Innis, McLuhan wrote, "The same symbolist perception applied to cinema showed that the montage of images was basically a return via technology to age-old picture language. S. Eisenstein's Film Form and Film Technique explore the relations between modern developments in the arts and Chinese ideogram, pointing to the common basis of ideogram in modern art, science and technology" (McLuhan, Letter to Harold Adam Innis). Linguists however, are reluctant to stray from considering the arbitrary signs of the phonetic alphabet exclusively as a medium constituting a language.

    If the process of constructing meaning ended at the level of each tangible but disparate media element then it would be like a walk through London's Speaker's Corner. There would be a chaotic din of unrelated arguments. Each 'speaking' element would be competing for dominance. Hypermedia needs to harmonize page elements by organizing them to each speak in turn. The problem is how to control dominance of new media objects in groups.

    A solution is to devise strategies to control the relative foregrounding of each element in turn, and in both time and space. This should enable each to make its unique contribution to the construction of a web site's meaning. Since they relate to each other both as collage and as montage it is useful to use the terms icon and index loosely to mean simultaneous and sequential respectively. This is how reading a web site works so this is how hypermedia needs to work.

    The style and theme of one media element influences the others by contextually qualifying meaning. However the multiple elements of a hypermedia document can't all be 'center stage' at once. There needs to be shifts of attention from one to the other.

    Each discrete element needs in turn to assume temporary dominance. If they all had equal dominance simultaneously they would not be able to contribute their meaning to the work because of being 'drowned out' by the other media element voices.

    By employing strategies to shift attention from one element to the other and by leaving the viewer freedom to browse and interpret the document...to interpret as an experience rather than just downloading predefined data, there is a possibility for the spontaneous emergence of a synergistically co-coordinated global thematic.

    Once digitized and contextualized hypermedia generates a new level of meaning based on interactions of the unseen connoted or overtonal meaning. This is by a process Rolland Bartes terms imbrication (Barthe, Mythologies 115). Eisenstien would phrase this as generating an intellectual meaning by virtue of the interactions of the un-sensed conceptual units of an overtonal montage. This is produced from dialectic interactions of tangible audio-visual signs.

    Both of these terms, 'connoted meaning' and 'overtonal montage', have the meaning in new media of a global thematic generated by the inter-relations of discrete new media sign objects. Each type of these sign objects are media extensions of specific natural senses and the thematic they generate imitates our native competence for concept formation, however reductionist.

    A reader of hypermedia will identify with the extended perception of the new media objects to interpret the work and hopefully glean something of the author's intended meaning. The iconic and or indexical dimension of the new media sign objects should conform to the 'language' of a common cultural referent system of both the author and reader.

    Interpreted sign meanings juxtaposed in binary opposition define the relations of motifs that constitute the thematic of the work. Iconic signs align according to their similarity or dissimilarity to define contrasting relations. Indexical relations are defined by proximity, giving sequence or cause and effect. By assuming significant positions in the web site they constitute the conceptual meaning of the hypermedia document.

    A red graphic juxtaposed with a text word cat does not equal the statement "red cat". Color language does not collate with sufficient precision to text or other media types. Similarly a photograph within a hypermedia document juxtaposed with a paragraph of text and a sound clip does not translate laterally. Therefore they do not interact laterally.

    Instead the self referential and media specific new media sign objects refer their produced meanings as raw material to be reused in the web site's over arching symbol structure. This is the locus of potential meaning creation for hypermedia. Here meanings have the common denominator of being conceptual, intangible and indifferent to media specific determinants.

    These conceptual meanings now have the ability to inter-translate and interact with each other, similarly to how all media that can be digitized can be placed into a new media matrix. Their proximity within a web site and their compatible themes motivates the reader to interpret them as a group. In this manner the generated meanings of each discrete new media object on a web site form the basis for a higher order layer of signification that is the thematic of the hypermedia document.

    Photography radically changed our collective sense of cultural diegetic space. It defined the cultural competence to see Earth from the moom as a global village, and soon from mars on our televisions or computers. It offered the decisive counter weight to the convention of excessively sequential perception induced by the dominace of print media. With photography all is simultaneous at the moment of exposure, either in frame or out of frame. Within the decontextualizing and recontextualizing frame edge all is seen analytically in series as this but 'not that.'

    Relative to the constantly rolling sequence of the print experience a photographic representation has a sense of pause that has been missing in western culture. We see and ask ourselves, "Is it this or is it that?" rather than directing our attention to the "Does it do this or that?" of the next unit of a sequence.

    As description the characteristic realism of photography overpowers second hand speech and print. It re-defined the sense of truth for the west causing the obsolescence of all media preceding it. Our truth and reality had been deductive. The empirical realism of photography is inductive. It reversed the idealism favoured by print culture by extending our perception of our space. It exchanged the ideal of beauty expressed in figurative painting for the veracity of extended visual experience in optically real imagery. It turned theatre and the novel into film. It sculpts our contemporary definition of reality with its frame edge. This act of sculpting meaning by positioning the frame edge is the missing mark in Barthe's analysis of photography. (ref)

    Photography needs to be seen as part of a media group including film and video. The common denominator is optical realism enabling extended and creative inductive processes. It eclipses all preceding media by confronting transcendent deduction motivating the renaisance with its inductive grasp of the real order, it's realism and ubiquity. Photo-realism is now also obsolete. With digital editing the photograph is now seamlessly mutable and therefore is as useless as proof as a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Once digitized the optically realistic image is composed of the same 1's and 0's as a drawing program and just as easily modified. The pro side of this is that the media specific character of photography is now extended to include the imaginary order. This can produce nonsense but so could realism. It enables a more synergetic and whole human experience to be represented.

    The universal digitizing and control of information on the Internet has again redefined reality, and in a common mannor for all cultures on earth. Rather than an authoritive hierarchical statement there are multiple or plural realities where fluctuating meanings are found. Meanings are created in structuralist terms as, "relations between things" rather than being idealistically inherent in objects as form. The emerging truth of the internet is based on multiple shifting relations of common human discourse. Statements do not have authority, are often incorrect and are never the last word on a subject. You can get three or four versions of any information you want and then decide which parts are usefull to you. There are once again, as in the Orient, spaces for pause, yin as well as yang.

    Accepting that media extend human sense it is logical to collate the terms of these senses with the extended media objects of hypermedia. Given that they do not inter-translate to a synergistically unified message as readily as our natural senses there is still a significant possibility and necessity for a synergy of these elements. It is an emerging new competence to be utilized in our struggles.

    Innis held that imbalance in media control of the time and space dimensions results in the collapse of a state (Innis introduction 5) and McLuhan adapted this to suggest that a balanced mixed-media education is equally imperative (McLuhan, Understanding Media 267).

    While discussing the 1920's kino-eye films of the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov, Manovich introduces his concept of the web as being definitively a database, but also a dynamic database. He asserts that with film as kino-eye, "This gradual process of discovery is film's main narrative, and it is told through a catalog of discoveries. Thus in the hands of Vertov, the database, this normally static and 'objective' form, becomes dynamic and subjective" (Manovich 12). The series of iconic images reveal the indexical or narrative aspect, what Pierce would consider to be an intrinsically and simultaneously related dimension. Vertov pushed the documentary objectivity of the camera to such an extreme that it's function reverses. He foregrounds the code that is implied by his photo-realistic cinematic representations. His database becomes, "dynamic and subjective," as does the private 'information at our fingertips' universe of each computer user now.

    Further, Manovich asserts, "In a computer age the database comes to function as a cultural form in its own right. It offers a particular model of the world and of the human experience. It also affects how the user conceives the data it contains" (Manovich 37). He theorizes that the photograph and the computer, which were invented simultaneously, and that with the addition of storage media, film and computer tape, developed mass culture and the contemporary internet (Manovich 21-26). The internet, "Which can be thought of as one huge distributed media database, also crystallized the basic condition of the new information society: overabundance of information of all kinds" (Manovich 35).

    Since media, like all tools, are extensions of our senses the internet can be considered to be an extension of our nervous system. The web connects all people's senses in a manner that is global both in terms of it's internal structure and in the sense of over-arching the entire planet, without regard for culture or national boundaries.

    In a web site disparate but structurally unified new media objects in a hypermedia matrix scale upwards infinitely to connect the elements of the internet in what can now literally be called the global village. Our extended minds are now connected. This structural co-ordination produces a hyper sense-media synergy of the experiences they record. We can expect this to create a new worldview where even terrorists are neighbors.

    This media synergy is based not within the specific sense-media used but on the higher level organization of each of their generated conceptual meanings. New points of view, attitudes and questions, emerge from speeding up communication between all humans to create a village like immediacy. This newly enabled experience literally constitutes a pan global extended nervous system. Now eskimos can watch Australians on the news.

    Having a global nervous system is not a sterile abstraction. Emotional underpinning of these new experiences can be seen in the defensive internet isolationism of China or the 'anxiety' felt by Americans whose authorities are no longer able to control copy-write or other legal boundaries...the 'sexual energy' attendant upon the unrestrainable internet pornography industry...or in more polite circles the chat room romance. These are fundamental human sets of emotions which are becoming 'global-tribal'.

     An interesting question emerges. To what extent is this an evolutionary step for mankind through a phase of technological integration? Is the internet extended common nervous system part of a living entity? No because it is not genetically determined...Or, yes because it is a human language, inseperable from the people who created and use it.

    The result of this new sense/media synergy is global in both individual and cultural terms. This is very different from the case of print where one media-sense exclusively dominated to form a culture reduced to it's visual and linear terms, a process which tends to atrophy the other senses. Through books mankind could speak without pause, without listening. Now in the more dynamic media culture man is more whole or complete as a human. We are global as individuals and as a group. Citzens who used to be bound by nationalism are now co-present and effectively connected. This international co-presence is a reversal from the slower print culture which gave us individuality and nationalism. This new media empowerment of the subject within the global village changes all social relations. We now doubt the relevance of contemporary borders on both a personal and national scale.

    The 'information at our fingertips' and 'rich text' of computer technology now available for the creation of hypermedia will be further encouraged by a wider bandwidth internet. The emerging new media culture will be both world wide yet highly granular in terms of unique cultural expression. Only the internet has the processing power to build this and communicate it.

    This digitization of all media in the common field of a web page is enabling a new media synergy similar in function to the mind's ability to conceptualize our experience via a symbolic ordering of information from all our senses. A projection of human senses that is a complete or more natural sensory synergy via its extension to the projected nervous system that is the electronic Internet, is generating a new world culture where all people are co-present and effectively connected.

    

    Once assimilated the culture of the Internet will be an expression of a more balanced human perspective than the more reductionist and alienating print media could be by itself. This sensory generalization constitutes a built in defense against media reductionism, which McLuhan called "media fallout" (McLuhan, Understanding Media 267)

    

     The future of emerging global culture will not be determined by techknology alone. To create these changes hypermedia needs to be the result of constructing a supportive matrix in which to structure the realization of coherent thematics in both multiple media specific terms and dynamically as signs. Hypermedia is the enabling structure of internet culture.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill And Wang, 1981.
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Cape, 1972; Paladin 1973.
Eco, Umberto. A Theory Of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979
Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Sense. Ed. and Trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.
Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form. Ed. and Trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.
Hawkes, Terence, Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977.
Innis, Harold. Empire and communications. Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1950.
Jakobson, Roman. The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles' in Fundamentals of Language. Mouton: Hague.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge Massachusetts, London England: The MIT Press, 2001.
McLuhan, Marshall. Letter to Harold Innis. St.Michael's College, March 14, 1951.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,1962.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Peirce, C.S. Speculative Grammar. Boston: Harvard.
Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars, 1978.
Wollen, Peter. Signs and Meaning in the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972.