Fixed or fluid?: document stability and new media

Abstract

One of the crucial properties of documents through the ages has been their fixity. The ability to mark surfaces in relatively stable ways has made it possible for people distributed across space and time to see the same images and thereby to have access to the same meanings or communicative intent. Today, however, with the increasing use of digital technologies, it is often asserted that we are moving from the fixed world of paper documents to the fluid world of digital documents. In this paper I challenge this assertion, arguing instead that all documents, regardless of medium, are fixed and fluid. Thus, although paper documents do fix aspects of communication, they do (and must) also change; and although digital documents are easily changeable, they must also be capable of remaining fixed. I make use of this analysis in two ways: first, to examine the fixity and fluidity of hypertext; and second, to critique Bolter's argument in Writing Space concerning the movement from “fixed to fluid.”