Writing is taking place and finding space through the networks, in the wires, in places prescribed, and in places being invented, as I speak, or yet unimagined. Those networked places are where writing is headed in this late age of dwindling printed resources. What's different about these places, these networked spaces, from where writing has resided over the past couple of hundred years, is it's cheap and pretty easy to get to much trouble, potentiating the dissolution of authority and ownership over the world of ideas. If teachers don't find these spaces and use them, ask their students to use them, inventing and reinventing ways of writing, they do so at their own peril, for others will move beyond us and take our students with them. 

Writers don't need to get past the gatekeepers to write any more, at least those gatekeepers who consciously, conscientiously kept the gates. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no gates. There are starting gates, Louis and Bill Gates, spiritual learning gates (nine of them), the hyborian gates, the pearly gates, the gates of hell. But the gates that are stopping people from getting to this place where writing is and will take place are not so formidable, not so cloaked in a language unimaginable, indecipherable, hidden, dark. Evidence of this place is going to be right in the middle of everyone's t.v. monitors, in competition with the nightly news. Look at the signs of networked writing in our magazines and newspapers, on our television programs, and in the world of business. Someone has to write all of this. The networked addresses are prominent, within reach. Reading, thinking and writing are interwoven, but which follows which? What should we focus on when we teach writing, most of the time? How do we balance the need for reading and thinking to have taken or be taking place when we write? How do we keep students writing all the time, thinking, reading, writing, thinking, writing, and writing more? 

Introduce them to networked writing. 

Who is going to be doing the introducing of students to this way of writing? That's up to the educators of this country. One Gate, Henry Louis, charges that as educators, " . . . we have to demand a structural change in this country, the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for our cities, . . . . We have to take people off welfare, train them for occupations relevant to the highly technological economy of the twenty-first century, and put them to work." I don't apologize for bringing students into networked ways of writing, requiring them to pay attention to their own electronic reading, writing and thinking space. By requiring them to write in technologically rich environments, we invite them in to where they are going to be working, thinking, and writing in their future work. 

Teachers can make sure that the gates are wide open. 

WORKS CITED
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. and Cornel West. "Racism, Poverty, and the Talented Tenth." The Future of the Race. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
Online at www.minorities-jb.com/african/racism.html. 22 April 1998.