text, such as one might pour from a cup.

some of the first distinctions made in this lupton reading is that between the time-based verbal stream and the written or printed word. writing comes as an intermediate step, necessary before the standardizations of print, which pave the way for simultaneous spatial ordering of information. the text moves from the words from someone's mouth, fleeting, into something catalogue-able, that can be rearranged and searched and put into different orders depending on the input. a "work," according to roland barthes, is a text locked into place, unchanging and copyrighted, whereas the text itself is a shifting mass of interconnected ideas that can be re-ordered and hyper-linked to and from infinitely, in 2, 3, or even 4 dimensions. the containers we have access to as designers today to hold our text are very different from those at the dawn of print. digital media seems to lend itself strenuously to searchability, databases, hypertext, the constant reordering of smaller containers for smaller amounts of information into stacks and arrays that best suit the needs of the users, who have been trained by their experiences online to give up their time sparingly at best, and thus, who will be unwilling to read a great body of thought in a linear train in the hopes of maybe, someday, finding the information they are seeking. displayed type has become, through all this digital usage, as much or more a method for wayfinding and categorizing than simply a tool for expressing ideas.