The Literature

But why don't we have other options besides print? What does print offer that other modes of intellectual discourse (lecture or oral debate, for instance) do not? The answers to these questions have to do less with pragmatics and more with the social organization of discourse. As Latour points out, publication in print allows a research community to construct its specific literature, a system of references that validates or invalidates a particular claim: "the status of a statement depends on other statements" (Latour 1987, 27). Any given article in the literature is linked both retrospectively and prospectively to other articles, either by references to work previously published or by implicit links to future developments. Our print-based academic culture has developed numerous ways to promote this process, including genres of writing -- the research report, the theoretical paper, the textbook.

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