Meditating on Moulthrop

In trying to remember to not take the author, Stuart Moulthrop and his article too seriously, I found myself mesmerized by the intricate data in this paper. As I tried to discern both the complexity of the subject matter and Moulthrop's brain soup I somehow came to terms with his fictional postmodern paradise, Xanadu. With patience and fortitude I sifted through his techno-garble only to find the concept of Xanadu and Hyperreality all frightenly relevant and bewitching. I say bravo to Moulthrop for following the rigid guidelines of a critical paper while at the same time stepping far beyond the boundaries of conventional writing. What's more, his ability to implement an entirely new system of words and terms baffles me; I wonder how much longer society can stave off the vernacular use of such words like "populitism" and "hypotext."To begin with, Xanadu is a theoretical ideal (much like a techno-paradise or heaven) that paradoxically exists in the world of online omnipotence yet also remains a total myth, think urban legends of other dimensions and Utopia. Moulthrop challenges the reader to consider both the complete destruction or "implosion" of technology and the inevitabl evolution of communication through the "system" or in layman's terms: the web. According to Moulthrop the orgins of hyperreality stem from a false reasoning, a simulated reality in which we have all become all-too accustomed. Yet it is the hopeless and reckless abandonment of the past that will eventually propel us furhter forward into The Age of Technology and Perfection. Recently, I realized a severity and dominance of online jobs these days. The economy dives into torrents of poverty and despair yet the uprise in online companies and the boom of website-only functioning businesses ricochets with power and force throughout our suffering society. Is it a question of embracing the madness or holding fast to a dying form of communication, simple print based text? Moulthrop's Hyperreality has strange charateristics of not only a New World Order (which, of course is an antiquated term at this point) and religion. Realistically Moulthrop has indeed touched upon another scary concept involving online text and literature becoming something of its own "catechism." Technology certainly has the ability to morph into a new religion; or maybe it already has...Society's obsession with staying connected resembles a religious fervor and a collective passion reflected in the pages of the Old or New Testament. As we pray to the gods in cyberspace scholars and writers can take comfort that Hyperreality has not sacrificed old print and the book, but instead technology has merely changed the form by which we access our simple ways of communicaton. "Hypertext...[t]he end of the death of literature."