"Or vice versa".
In his prologue to his 1979 book Teaching as a Conserving Activity, Neil
Postman wrote about writing Teaching as a Subversive Activity which he
had written ten years earlier with Charles Weingartner:
For every idea we expressed as "true," we could easily
think of its opposite, or at least of some alternative, as also true. It was
as if we and our shadow were looking at the matter from opposite poles; our
right was his left, his right our left. We understood which way we were facing
but it was not hard for us to imagine others, or even ourselves, facing in another
direction. As a consequence of this double vision, Charlie suggested early in
our collaboration that the last sentence of each of our books should be "Or
vice versa."
Though Postman was no great fan of hypertext, to my mind there's something inherently
hypertextual about this approach. When we commit something to paper, we take a
stand. But often we also know that the same arguments that brought us to our present
opinion, were they to be slightly differently organized, might have led us to
an opposite position. Linking, though essentially nothing more than a technical
tool for connecting two entities is capable of giving expression to the ambivalence
that seems always to be just below the surface of the seemingly definitive positions
that we take. It was perhaps this hinting toward ambivalence that Steven
Johnson noted in his discussion of Suck magazine.
Go to: Vanilla-flavored linking, or
Go to: The
incredible shrinking directory, or
Go to: Dr.
Hierarchy and Mr. Associative