A Postscript

Visiting Borders bookstore on the day I completed this review, I entered into discussion with one of the managers on the Luddite's anti-machine ideology, to which he commented "It's not the machine that is bad, it's what you do with it." Later, reading the following paragraph from Theodore Roszak's The Cult of Information, I realized my own re-articulations were already underway. Roszak writes,

If the Information Age continues into a fifth (or a tenth) generation to come, when the computers will have become microscopic in size and jammed full with millions of times the data they now hold, there is no chance whatever that we will mechanize the dilemmas of cultural debate and hard personal choice. Ideas produce knowledge, and human minds -- quite mysteriously -- create ideas. Who would want it any other way?

So it is that I feel compelled to conclude this review with an imperative: Let the discussion and re-articulations among all of us begin! I am equally compelled to say "thank you" to Johnson-Eilola and to give him his own last words:

Imperfect angels, nostalgic for a past that never was, we might instead learn to live as cyborgs. In mapping hypertext use we do not create a new world from nothing, but we do create discourses in which old worlds might be transformed. (242)

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