2. A simple premise I take to be pretty self-evident about the universe around me: American culture has virtually no memory, no sense of the past.

3. Our attention spans are as Plexiglas cages of dexedrined flies in nose cones of Tomahawk missiles strapped to Saturn rockets, nine million pounds of thrust behind us to get us the hell away from yesterday.
We are, in other words, a daydream nation, an Alzheimer's province in the United State of Amnesia.

Ours is a pioneer consciousness that doesn't like to look over its shoulder, check out the rear-view mirror, environmentally, culturally, you name it, because objects back there are always larger than they appear.
We want the short-term fix. We want the up-and-coming star on the cultural horizon. We want next week's flash-trend yesterday.
We live in a pluriverse where, as the narrator of William Gibson's Neuromancer knew, "fads swept the youth . . . at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly."
If we maintain any sense of history at all, it's usually one shot through with a golden nimbus of nostalgia . . . the one where American Graffiti represents the fifties, Star Trek the sixties, where Forrest Gump, an idiot, becomes our national hero.
Or,

4. as poet Charles Potts writes:

5. my sweet, hard-working, well-meaning student who, after listening to the sociohistorical lectures I delivered in my undergraduate Survey of American Literature course, studied his notes diligently and then wrote with sureness and poise during his final exam that the Civil War took place between 1964 and 1968 at Columbia University at roughly the same time Sigmund Freud published The Interruption of Dreams.

6. The Good Life precludes a look back at what we've left in our somnambulant wake. It precludes a sense of context, a genuine sense of understanding, the idea of that rear-view mirror.
Nor, of course, is that student of mine alone in his historico-phobia, his MDS, his Mnemonic Deficiency Syndrome.
That's my point.
He's a manifestation of our destiny. He has his hands full trying to navigate the house of mirrors, the garden of forking paths, that comprises his contemporary multidimensional reality.
The last thing he can worry about is what happened two weeks ago, two years ago, the day before he was born.
His cerebral RAM is in sync with MTV's rotation schedule.
His mind's a cathode-ray tube . . .

7. "Oh my god!" she thought. "Nanobots from Metaluna are singing in my tongue. This can't be happening! This can't be happening!" She tried to scream, but couldn't.

8. Which is, in a certain sense, just fine . . . so long, that is, as he doesn't grow up to be a writer with aspirations toward the innovative, the fringe, the alternative, because his disinterest in all history-literary history included-will probably lead him, along with many I see around me every day, to reinvent the narratological wheel James Joyce discovered in 1922, Laurence Sterne in the eighteenth century, Rabelais in the sixteenth.
Or so long as he doesn't grow up to be an editor, publisher, or literary critic, because his diachronic cultural disinterest will probably lead him smack into a kind of synchronic bibliocentrism, just as prevalent and quite possibly as unwholesome as any ethnocentrism you're ever likely to encounter, about what the book should be and do.
Because, for him,

9. the book has been and done one thing.

10. Except the reality, multidimensional or otherwise, is just the opposite. The book has been and done various things at various times in various places in various ways.
Five thousand years ago, for instance, baked clay tablets in Mesopotamia recorded deeds to land and other business records.
Egyptians, the Chinese, Greeks, and Romans used the inner bark of the papyrus plant for books, pasting sheets together in strips sometimes 144 feet long.
The codex, made up of several sheets of vellum, or the treated skin of lambs, folded into a section called a gathering, which could then be sewed into something resembling our contemporary book, though hand-written, every one different from every other, existed for centuries after its appearance in 300 AD.
The Chinese practiced a simple form of printing over 1000 years ago, and there seems to have been some sort of forerunner to the printed book in Holland.
Gutenberg, of course, developed his version in Germany during the 1440s and 1450s, and it reached England in 1476 when William Caxton set up shop at Westminster; more than 30,000 different books were generated within the first fifty years after those first presses started running.
By the 1800s, printing had evolved or devolved (depending on your point of view) into a mechanical trade rather than a handicraft, and by the 1900s the book had become mass-produced, hundreds of thousands of copies of a single one published.

11. Today, in America alone, about 45,000 books are published each year, 4500 of them novels, 250 of them first novels, and they show up in about 30,000 bookstores across the country.
Someone like John Grisham's law-firm novels sell more than 4.5 million copies in hardcover alone, while most writers and publishers consider sales of even a few thousand a jaw-dropping, lip-slathering success.
And, in addition to those hardcovers, there are paperbacks, growing from American dime novels and British penny dreadfuls that surfaced during the nineteenth century and flourished after the Second World War.
But all this

12. has changed again, and changed radically, over the last five or eight years with the proliferation of electronic media, especially the home computer, modem, and emergence of the World Wide Web.
Imagine that.
No. Really. Imagine it.
Fairly tangible atoms of documentation and relaxation have morphed into ephemeral and informational bits at a rate of shift fast as that cage-full of dexedrined flies in the Tomahawk.
Moreover, the Net's growth, we learn from the media almost daily, has become geometric. By most measurements, it doubles in size every nine months or so. MCI has seen the flow over its network swell fifty-six-fold in less than two years.
There's a very real question whether such congestion might ultimately slow data-transfer to a treaclesque pace, undercutting all those snazzy plans for interactive games and cheap long-distance calls before they really even get going.

13. Meantime, the media dubbed 1995 The Year of the Internet, and, indicative of our culture's angst before the Net's advent, the New York Times ran a misleading article in 1996 suggesting there was something empirically observable out there called "Internet Addiction," even though Ivan Goldberg, the psychiatrist who coined the term on a satiric whim, said the whole thing was a joke . . . as though spending a couple hours surfing the computerized ether has more in common with snerking cocaine or chugging Mad Dog 20/20 than it does with watching a little television or making, as John Perry Barlow said not too long ago, some CB broadcasts, only typing.
As though the Internet won't by the turn of the millennium become invisible through its very ubiquity, one more way of doing business and pleasure, of communicating with each other and entertaining ourselves interactively . . . like the telephone or automobile a hundred or so years ago.
As though the question, finally, is whether or not we can live without it (undoubtedly we can) rather than whether or not we want to live without it (undoubtedly we don't).

14. It's utterly amazing, isn't it, the stuff of science fiction, like that announcement in San Antonio at the American Astronomical Society last year that there are really fifty billion galaxies out there, and not the mere ten billion we'd assumed, each of which consists of anywhere from fifty to a hundred billion stars.
Bruce Sterling, the shrill spokesperson for the cyberpunk movement, was right when he pointed out in his 1986 Mirrorshades anthology that "the cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world. For them, the techniques of classical 'hard SF'-extrapolation, technological literacy-are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life."
And here we are, living in the middle of it, a world that makes Gibson's look a bit drab, really, a little frayed around the digital matrix.
And yet, shockingly adaptable species that we are, we're already thinking: been there, done that, so what's new today?

15. Just as every age gets the literature it deserves, so too does every age get the idea of the book it deserves.

16. Books have been wax tablets and silk. They've been clay and sheep skin. They've been scrolls and paperbacks.
And now they've begun to transmogrify once more in some exciting and, at least to traditional readers, unnerving directions.
First you have conventionally bound books in experimental form, like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic fiction The Watchmen (1986), or Derek Pell's Assassination Rhapsody (1989), or Art Spiegelman's Maus (1986, 1992), which represent bibliographic world-eating engines. Looking back not only to the underground comix from the sixties, but also to the surrealist collage novels from the twenties, these combine everything from interviews and cartoons to police reports, fake autobiographies, encyclopedia entries, coffee cup stains, and magazine profiles.

17. "We all have so much to carry," her brother replied.

18. Next you have fairly conventional books in electronic form, such as those which appear at the Bibliobytes Web site , where you can browse the first chapter of a Spider Robinson novel or Harlan Ellison story free, and then, if you like what you read, send your credit-card number through encrypted message to the publisher and download your choice in the print-size and format you like. Or those which appear at the Web site (On-Line Book Page), where you can read and download what interests you-everything from a host of banned books to Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905)-at no cost.

19. And third you have new embodiments of books in electronic form, especially the hypertext, often generated by the Storyspace program, that allows the user to create and link fields of info at will and to retrieve that info nonsequentially, something like shuffled electronic index cards. Many of these texts are available for browsing and purchasing from the Web site (Eastgate Systems), and include such electronic novels as Michael Joyce's landmark creation, Afternoon (1987), and John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1992) which fuses text, music, and graphics, as well as such works of criticism as Christane Paul's Unreal City: A Hypertextual Guide to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1995) or Diane Greco's Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric (1995).

20. If we think of the World Wide Web, not as a series of semi-isolated hypertextual nodes, but as one gargantuan hypertextual faction, we can also add a number of other electronic forms of the new book to this list: multi-user computer games and social meeting places known, respectively, as MUDs and MOOs, for instance; user-interest groups; tree-fiction, a form of hypertext that allows no returns to former decision points and no merging of paths; electronic serials like The Spot, which follows the daily lives of five inhabitants of a California beach house and to which readers can contribute advice and plot suggestions; and electronic narratives generated by classical AI programs like James Meehan's Talespin (1976).

21. Which is to say nothing of the glasses now under development in Silicon Valley that will project texts on the inside of your darkened lenses, or, it goes without saying,

22. virtual reality itself, already the dead horse of films and fiction, which will allow us in fewer than fifteen years to enter a sense-around cartoon-gel room where we'll be able see and hear Homer, perhaps incarnated as a lobster, recite The Odyssey to us while we watch its events acted by computer-generated thespians who never existed outside an algorithm and read its text as it scrolls by on some screen, perhaps incarnated as a fish tank, clicking on textured words or phrases that will send us into reams of research . . . hearing, if we wish, what ancient instruments sound like, or maybe viewing examples of Greek architecture, or maybe linking to other epics, or tracts on epic composition, or so forth and so on-all the while monitoring our incoming e-mail and video phone calls and stock market reports and late-breaking Headline News via icons floating unobtrusively in some small corner of our perspective.

23. These last few electronic manifestations of the book are, if you stop to think about it, some of the most environmentally friendly ones, too.
Richard Brautigan once wondered aloud "if what we are publishing now is worth cutting down trees to make paper for."
That's a great question.
Digital publishing not only has the ability to take out a fair number of middlepeople, typesetter to printer, PR troops to distributors, from the reading equation, thereby drastically reducing-or even doing away with-the notion of cost in text production, not to mention re-empowering the writer by drastically reducing the marketing apparatus that exists between him or her and the reader, but it also has the ability to accomplish this in a manner that disturbs not a single tree, spits not a single sulfate into the atmosphere, involves only electronic recycling.

24. And in a manner that will be increasingly comfortable to partake of. It won't be long before, for the price of a pair of Adidas, you can purchase a leather-bound (or, if you prefer, ersatz leather-bound) computer that looks like a book, smells like a book, and feels like a book. Open it to reveal two back-lit displays. Insert a credit-card-like slab in place of a disk. Curl up in your bed or bath. And read in any font, type-size, or layout that suits your fancy.
Without paper.
With a minimal environmental footstep.

25. She realized when she was six she was pregnant. The brother she had always wanted was growing ectopically on the wall of her intestines, product of an alien abduction. He matured slowly, several hundred thousand cells a year, among her waste. On her thirteenth birthday he became a miniature television set and began broadcasting to her through the voice-chip implanted in her tongue. "Kill dad," he said. "Show me you care." "The second order simulacrum simplifies the problem by the absorption of appearances, or by the liquidation of the real," she replied. That night she drugged her father using chemicals found in the saliva of rare red South American tree frogs she slathered on his Big Mac. He realized what she had done, but it was too late. He collapsed at the table. It wasn't enough to kill him, though, so she rummaged through the kitchen and located a steak knife, which she inserted, once, one fourth-inch deep, into his right biceps, then ran from the house, hitchhiked into the country, and stood in the middle of a cornfield, waiting for the silver products of her imagination to beam her to a higher level of understanding. Instead she was attacked by a covey of wild cats (the wandering souls of electrocuted, hanged, and lethally injected serial killers) crazed by the scent of frog saliva, beef, and special sauce on her fingertips. She died a blind hiss-filled death. "You really love me," her brother whispered as she perished. "You love me, you love me, you love me."

26. In any case, what we're seeing as the book enters a new cyberformational stage in its evolution is the enactment of deconstruction, not as some nifty series of pyrotechnic abstractions by Derrida &Co., but in the very means of text-creation itself.
"Every novel should have a beginning, a muddle, and an end," Peter de Vries once said.
At the end of this millennium, it's all muddle, all movement toward arbitrary, discontinuous, unpredictable, illogical, digressive, nonsequential, unstable, multimedia events that confuse the conventional book with television and stereo, blending static images, sounds, and even film clips with processed text.
Or, as George P. Landow points out in Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (1992): these new formal manifestations suggest that "we must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks."

27. This is the aesthetic space Raymond Federman augured nearly a quarter of a century ago in his manifesto, "Surfiction: A Position," first published in the Partisan Review in 1973. There, in an act of spiritual autobiography that informs much of his criticism, he essentially glosses his own 1971 novel, Double or Nothing, by claiming we must "renew our system of reading," which has become "restrictive and boring," by innovating the "paginal syntax" of our texts. To accomplish this, we must short-circuit our traditional reading strategies that propel us from the upper lefthand corner of the page to the lower right in a "preordained" manner. We must reinvent the page, the environment of reading, by embracing new typographical prospects, shapes and designs, new relations among textual parts, multiple possibilities of plot and character, and even what we mean when we say the word "book," thereby engendering "a sense of free participation in the writing/reading process, in order to give the reader an element of choice (active choice) in the ordering of the discourse and the discovery of its meaning."

28. This is also the aesthetic space of the "ideal text" Roland Barthes imagined three years before Federman in S/Z (1970) where "the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entries, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one."

29. A description, after the fact, theory typically playing catch-up with its literary target, of Robert Coover's short story from Pricksongs and Descants, published in 1969, "The Babysitter," which begins as a work of suburban domestic realism only to elide into an experimental investigation that offers contradicting plot elements that may be actual events or the imaginings of the characters or of the author himself.

30. Or of Julio Cortazar's 1963 prefiguration of the fictionally webbed moment, Hopscotch, which presents the reader with a 155-chaptered novel that "consists of many books, but two books above all": 1) the first can be read "in a normal fashion" and ends with chapter 56; 2) the second must be read in a sequence indicated in the "Table of Instructions" and begins with chapter 73-both readings revolving around one Horacio Oliveira, whose ambition is to fragment his personality, like Tyrone Slothrop will succeed in doing in Gravity's Rainbow the same year Federman publishes his manifesto, in such a way that his life becomes a series of present instants.

31. Or of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, published in 1959, which transforms fiction into a plastic art related to the Action Painting of Jackson Pollock for, while Burroughs's book purports to be a record of a man's addiction to opiates, his apomorphine treatment, and his cure, it is also a larger exploration of cultural and aesthetic addiction in the form of an anti-narrative cold turkeying from the linear realistic novel, a hypertextual antecedent where the reader is invited to "cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point. . . . the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth, in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement."

32. "Let my baby live!" she cried.

33. Which is nothing if not a great description of James Joyce's 1939 virtually plotless, circularly structured, Celtically mythological, 600-plus paged linguistic masterpiece, Finnegans Wake, that I find impossible to read except as a hypertext, dipping in and out of it at will, sampling a lexia-analog here, a lexia-analog there, delighting in its musical structure which is more reminiscent of jazz improvisation than any conventional novelistic entity I know.

34. A point, when talking about Finnegans Wake, that seems almost embarrassingly obvious, but which hyperlinks that text with a larger alternative multifoliate aesthetic impulse which embraces polyphony, inclusiveness, an opening up and out to narratological possibility, which I think of as Convulsive Beauty, a term I lifted from André Breton, who asserted in the twenties that "beauty must be convulsive, or it will not be."

35. History, then, is not only a series of ruptures, but also a complex network of continuities, re-presentations, re-evaluations, re-collections, an ongoing circus of interesting minds in motion, and convulsive history is the history of continuing alternatives, diverse voices that play diverse indie counterpoint against the overly sweet dominant pop melody called The Mainstream. And that counterpoint thinks itself back through a hypothetical trajectory of vanguard art, appropriating from the past while nibbling always forward: through Surfiction, Metafiction, Punk, Cyberpunk, RiboFunk, the Multimedia Moment, the Deconstructive Turn, the Novel of Excess & Regress & Digress, Language Poetry, Beat fiction, Magical Realism, the Nouveau Roman, the New Wave, and so on, back through Lettrism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism, Decadence, Imagism, Vorticism, Futurism, and Symbolism . . . and back again, finally, to the doorstep of that paradigmless paradigm of Romanticism (think of Blake's schizoid visions, or, better, of the presence of Frankenstein's monster-the latter an appropriated, electrocuted, existentially and socially and epistemologically alien icon of extremity in the arts) with its thematics and formalistics of trespass, revolution, Dionysian border-breaking, psychotic breach, brilliant rage, paranoid rant . . . with its exploration of the illogical, the unconscious, the inner-world, the drastic aesthetico-spiritual brink.

36. An optic most recently reconfigured in the so-called Avant-Pop, a term appropriated by Larry McCaffery and Ron Sukenick from a Lester Bowie jazz album and referring to that contemporary multimedia mode of expression that as a subgenre of postmodernism splices the avant-garde's obsession with innovation, experimentation, and radicalization with a deep pop sensibility. The result: an extreme fusion and confusion of the traditional distinctions between "high" culture and "low" that takes many forms, from Stephen Wright's Going Native (1994), which subverts the tropes of a serial-novel through a series of unusual techniques, not the least of which is to shift point-of-view almost exclusively from killer to victim, to David Blair's cult film WAX, or: The Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991), a disruptive serio-comic narrative shot through with a compu-TV vision about cross-sexual reincarnation and the Gulf War told by Mesopotamian bees (which turn out to be the souls of the dead). Common to all Avant-Pop creations is an MTV-ized aesthetic that embraces speed, shock, high-tech, massive irony, data-thick consciousness, and (always ambivalently) the vast media-scape itself-a spectacular tele-geography on which Avant-Pop artists are the first generation to have teethed. Its instinct is one, as McCaffery writes, of "simultaneously engaging and resisting the data flow, of absorbing and incorporating features of the macro pop culture without catering to it," thereby plagiarizing and recontextualizing the manifestations of hyperconsumer capitalism in ways that illuminate its "biases and limitations while also suggesting the open-ended nature of intertextuality."

37. Which brings us back to the latest incarnations of the "book," which has mutated in the last five or eight years into an electronically illuminated manuscript, both new and not new, sometimes digital, sometimes a simulacrum of the digital, emblem in any case of the extreme Ovidian times we inhabit, where sudden and continual metamorphosis serves as dominant metaphor. Our Borgesian garden of forking paths has become high-tech. Down one passage you might find gay fiction, down others neohumanist or feminist or politically incorrect or Native American or Northwestern or Southern or African American or-and here's where things get really interesting-all of them at some web-work once. Diversity, whether subatomic or cultural, may well be old news from an old front from an old war. It is at least conceivable, taking fiction's stock here and now, that we are on the brink of some kind of literary unified field theory evinced by a slew of Barthesian texts by such writers as Kathy Acker, David Foster Wallace, Samuel Delany, Shelley Jackson, William Vollmann, and even that meta-author called the World Wide Web that combine rather than separate, consolidate rather than differentiate-not in a way that mean-spiritedly or closed-mindedly excludes and thus limits, but in a way that good-humoredly and open-armedly includes, termites along.

38. "I love my sister," her brother thought, flipping channels in her brain.

39. And here, surely, is where I should begin to conclude, where the metaphorical fife and drum should rise on my propaedeutic soundtrack, but I'm feeling pretty inconclusive these days, pretty unilluminated about the manuscript, so I'd rather end with a series of question-clusters stemming from what I've just said, instead of one snappy answer-site that implies by its rhetorical position and rhythms I already have it all figured out . . . invite you to think along with me about yesterday's tomorrow . . .

40. How long can artists crank up the artistic volume, redraw the counter-cultural map, ratchet up the cerebral distortion, tiptoe around on the Convulsive Edge before we trip off, fall over, end up producing nothing but perpetual perceptual white noise, unreadable geographies, self-obliterating feedback? How long, to phrase it slightly differently, can the New really be reNewed before it is: a) no longer New; or b) New but Untransformative? Is there an inevitable intractable vanguard horizon, an aesthetically terminal beach?

41. Indicative of this, is the so-called Avant-Pop in fact a new aesthetic conformation, or simply a relatively established subset of postmodernism (think, for instance, of Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, Thomas Pynchon) repackaged and remarketed by a younger generation of writers anxious to obliterate the very aesthetic history out of which they grew? If so, in what sense is the Avant-Pop symptomatic of a larger fin de millennial cultural construction? And, if not, what defines the Avant-Pop except its name?

42. "Since the surfictional story will not have a beginning, middle, and end," Federman concludes his manifesto, "it will not lend itself to a continuous and totalizing form of reading. It will refuse resolution and closure. It will always remain an open discourse." But while in a sense this is true enough with respect to Federman's project, and hypertext fiction in general, particularly when set next to works of traditional nineteenth-century realism, isn't it equally true that the illusion of free choice and open discourse is in the last analysis to some extent just that, an illusion . . . that as much as a writer may wish to impart a sense of autonomy and self-determination to his reader, isn't the writer always the ultimate shaper of the text, the endmost provider of possibilities? Shouldn't we keep in mind that behind the thing itself still remains the map of the thing itself (in the case of hypertext fiction this takes the form of the Storyspace writing program) created by the author, and that map of the thing itself by its very presence delimits choice, restricts narratological possibility, and regulates human freedom? If so, aren't we in effect simply discussing a difference in degree, not kind?

43. And what of the gargantuan hypertextual faction called the World Wide Web? If anyone can, and anyone does, "publish" there, if "publish" is the right word, where will the quality of publication go? Will digital democracy soon become another term for the cultural slobocracy Erza Pound always thought it really was? If not, why not? Or, to put it another way: does anyone really want to know what everyone thinks about anything? Where will the idea of literary value-whatever we might mean by that-go? Where should it go? How do we monitor it? How will we find it, if we should wish to? And, if we shouldn't, what exactly are we reading for in the first place?

44. What happens to our culture's conception of the author and authorship if books perforce become multimedia collaborative events, akin to infinite encyclopedias, where it is virtually and literally impossible to know where one creative hand leaves off and another picks up? And, in a related matter, what happens to the flesh-and-bone writer, if all but the most popular can no longer make a living from their craft? Should we entirely dispense with copyright as we have known it and seek new paradigms, as the Office of Technology Assessment advocated in 1986? Why can someone who buys a book or magazine sell it or give it away without paying additional royalties in the meat world, but not in cyberspace, if publishers have their way?

45. Will creative writing by necessity become for most a mild avocation because of economic realities? Is this situation really any different from any other point in history? If so, how?

46. What's happened to the reality studio of cyberspace in the face of that increasingly quaint cyberpunk myth that information wants to be free? Information, clearly, is not free to most Netsurfers, who pay around $20.00 a month for unlimited use, no matter what it may want to be. So are we Netsurfers less anarchic technohackers of our imaginations than just some more wingless workers in the unconscious antfarm of a burgeoning entertainment industry?

47. Certainly the commercial colonization of the Web has run rampant for about a year and half, but isn't it also true that no one really knows how many of the six million people who surf the Web regularly actually read the ads that are splayed there, that while a traditional broadcast ad can reach a passive audience of millions and cost about $5.42 per 1000 consumers, a narrowcast pitch on a dedicated Web site is seen only by those who make an effort to go there, and that, compared with TV and print, Web ads are pricey, costing about $75.00 per 1000 consumers?

48. Why do we feel it incumbent upon us to assert that information wants to be free (the basis, after all, of that American Ur-narrative, the First Amendment) in cyberspace, when, in fact, the Internet is a global series of electronic connections, not limited to the geographical borders of the United States, and hence the idea of information wanting to be free (along with the First Amendment) amounts to little more than a local ordinance in cyberspace?

49. Is the electronic ether in fact the new worldwide café that the early media hype proclaimed it to be . . . a new global meeting ground for, among others, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the alternativized? Or is it only the simulacrum of community populated by isolated aliases and posers who don't get out enough fostered by a society that's increasingly uncomfortable about interacting one-on-one in the meat world?

50. Is it possible that the Web represents, not the launch of a new radically democratic or even anarchic zone, but the beginning of a new technocracy that will ultimately discriminate between the computer-haves and computer-havenots, leaving the latter in the digital dust?

51. What will come to constitute the body in this Cartesian cyberspatial constellation? Do we really want our bodies to become, as they are in fact becoming there, nothing more than prosthetic devices for our minds?

52. Certainly the conventional hardcover book will be around for a long, long time, coexisting side-by-side with the electronic versions I've just mentioned ("Que será será," John Barth comments in his essay on the subject, "The State of the Art," "but not always in a hurry"). Will the proliferation of possibilities of what the book is and can be, however, lead to greater cultural (and hence, eventually, governmental) decentralization, or, ultimately, a push (as we saw recently with pornography on the Internet) toward great cultural (and hence governmental) control? Why does it seem to most Americans to be okay to contemplate censoring materials in cyberspace that we would never censor on the printed page, especially when there are easy-to-use shareware programs designed to screen out what we may not want to see on the Web?

53. Is it true, as Barth suggests, that the medium of hard-copy print may be able to accomplish certain things that its computerized counterparts can't-telling stories in a linear fashion even when their subjects aren't, for instance, or investigating the human experiencing of experience, the internal life of perceiving, feeling, and reflecting?

54. And what about the myth of cyberspatial longevity? What are we to think of RAND Corporation senior computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg's assertion that "the contents of most digital media evaporate long before words written on high-quality paper. And they often become unusably obsolete even sooner, as media are superseded by new, incompatible formats"?

55. What happens to humanities departments, to the very idea of reading as a communal activity, if hard-copy books evaporate into electronic hypertextual ones that each reader can and does read differently from every other reader? Do such departments become our eccentric equivalent of medieval monasteries, entrusted merely to housing the productions of the past? Does education become more interactive and hence more captivating for students, bringing them to digital books like cockroaches to spilled cereal . . . or just another version of commodified television with its MTV-ized rhythms, surfaces, and shine, all form and less and less reflective content?

56. And . . . finally, finally . . . the advent of the Net, especially the Web, was supposed to herald a brave new world, a fresh way of perceiving, but has it in fact done so? Is it the paradise Charles Potts says our Manifest Destiny always wants us to believe we're moving toward? Or is it rather, at least here, at least now, actually a lot slower and visually less snappy than television and film, a lot more expensive than we ever thought it would be, a lot less interesting at an audio-level than radio or CDs, and, so far, more distracting and hard on the eyes than traditional print? If so, where in the world, or out of it, are we going, and why?

57. "My mind is pain," she thought to herself, lying on her side among the stalks. "My mind is light. My mind is a cathode-ray tube. It's so beautiful I could die."

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