ABSTRACT
The phenomenon with which this book has been concerned is one to which sociology has been extraordinarily blind. It is also ubiquitous-at least in contemporary society. We are constantly implicated in and active in it-indeed this chapter, this book, your reading, are among its manifestations. It is the phenomenon of textually mediated communication, action, and social relations. As intellectuals we take it for granted much as we take for granted the ground we walk on or the air we breathe. Yet it not only constitutes both the arena and the means of our professional work, but permeates our everyday world in other ways. We get passports, birth certificates, parking tickets; we fill in forms to apply for jobs, for insurance, for dental benefits; we are given grades, diplomas, degrees; we pay bills and taxes; we read and answer advertisements; we order from menus in restaurants, take a doctor’s prescription to the drugstore, write letters to newspapers; we watch television, go to the movies, and so on and so on. Our lives are, to a more extensive degree than we care to think, infused with a process of inscription, producing printed or written traces or working from them. The omnipresence of these documentary or textual processes is now being entered by the technology of computers. As the textual process is thus radically modified and expanded in its organizing scope, we have become aware of it as a political issue affecting personal privacy.
