What did hypertext mean to us in the first place? The answer involves nostalgia because, although we were thinking about the future of writing, we were calling on a mythical past, one bound up in the related forces of technological development and more: Critically examining these forces can help us rethink not only our uses of hypertext but these broader forces as well, rewriting their histories in powerful ways. (Nostalgic Angels 176)

Our ability to think critically, with or without the Web, depends on how we approach technology. Johnson-Eilola reminds us that we imagine hypertext (and subsequently the Web) nostalgically because we always examine technology as isolated practices, a past separate from the present. But we are also nostalgic when we write hypertext because this is a method of writing dependent on appropriation. Appropriation encourages nostalgia through a cut and paste mentality. Through appropriation, we turn past styles into our own. Through the juxtaposition of appropriated discourse, we rethink our longings for '50s cool, for '60s activism, and for '70s funk (or, of course, any other fashion, ideology, media form, etc. one chooses). Images from the past are no longer lost, but quickly retrievable by the click of a mouse. Through cut and paste or through hyperlinking, past writings become our own. The process of appropriation and juxtaposition creates the ability to critique (as Johnson-Eilola demands) and to challenge institutional order. To be critical, though, we must go beyond mere nostalgia for "golden eras." The question remains whether Coover is offering us only nostalgia or something more.

But, then, maybe this is where I am stuck in the past and becoming dated, for one might well ask, Are not these Golden Age narrative webworks mere extensions of the dying book culture, as retrotech in their way as eBooks? Could it be that text itself is a worn-out tool of a dying human era, a necessary aid, perhaps, in a technically primitive world, but one that has always distanced the user from the world she or he lives in?

Nostalgia becomes an effort to minimize that distance, to return the user to past worlds: the pen, the typewriter, an era, a fashion. What, then, is the relationship between our reading habits and such nostalgia?