What New Innovation in Text?

I've been rereading Steven Johnson's Interface Culture, a book about computers, writing, culture, and meaning-making that came out in 1997 -- that's old for a book about technology. So some of his examples are outdated, but his philosophy of the way in which interface design and conception impacts writing is still right on the money, in my book.

He makes a prediction on page 145 that I am wrestling with:

We may, in fact, be on the cusp of a textual paradigm shift as profound as
the one ushered in by the rise of the word processor. All the elements are
in place for such a revolution; we just need the breakthrough software to bind
the elements together in a coherent whole.

It's been almost 10 years since he claimed this, and I'm not sure what he's talking about (to be fair, neither was he when he wrote this -- it was a prediction after all). But I have been thinking hard about this passage (and posting it into comments on several of my students' blogs to see what they make of it).

He claims that visual software has taken off (and it certainly has!), but I don't see things like Flash and Dreamweaver as making up the textual revolution that he was talking about. New writing tools have made concrete some ideas about the instability of authorship that have been floating around for the past 35 years, but that does not seem to be a textual revolution either -- so I don't think he'd point to something like Myka Vielstimmig's work and say, "Hey, look, it's the textual revolution!"

I'm really stumped . . .readers, how do you react to his prediction?