PORIDGE: postmodern rhizomatics in digitally generated environments — do we need a metatheory for W3?

The World Wide Web (W3) has proved to be an important step towards realising truly integrated information ecologies. The radical openness of the Web model of information processing poses a number of fundamental problems that cannot be tackled in a technology‐oriented framework alone. What is at stake, it will be argued, is a large scale restructuring of information processing environments affecting both information providers and end‐users. The basic strategy of the Web, the global HTML (hypertext mark‐up language)‐based hypertext, will be discussed with particular reference to methodological implications in text‐oriented fields. The central claim will be the importance of the Web as a generator for new leading metaphors of globally networked information processing.