Abstract

The paper offers a survey of different kinds of electronic textuality (e-mail, blog, sms, tweets, social networks, e-book), considered from the point of view of their ability to convey complex textual structures and arguments. While e-mail and sms are characterized by a low level of complexity, twitter hashtags allow for relatively complex threads to be built upon extremely short and simple messages. New web tools such as Storify.com represent a further step in the direction of building complexity out of simple and molecular content, mainly drawn from social networks. Augmented e-books allow for still higher levels of complexity, adding to the traditional ability of books to convey structured and highly sophisticated reasoning, the ability of providing both content and service layers (including social reading tools) and of visually representing complex datasets.