Xanadu and Second Literacy

Both Foucault and Moulthrop rely on the metaphor of a map in their essays:

“Maps derive not from territories but from other map-making enterprises,” (Moulthrop 1).

“The boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place…the heterotopia par excellence,” (Foucault 6).

Moulthrop predicts Xanadu to be no different from the Disney/Speilbergian future as “a place we must come ‘back’ to,” (Moulthrop 3). Thus, the future is a Foucauldian “boat,” a “place” in temporal space, “without a place,” (Foucault 6).

In terms of Xanadu as a technological innovation, a thing of “the future,” what does its recursiveness say about Time? The Xanadu refigures literacy—something of the past—to be re-enabled by hypertext, a thing from a place of as-yet unrealized existence. Is hypertext the “progressive self-modification” in the recursive loop of Time (represented by evolutions of literacy as markers of some kind of progress)?