The editors attempt to trace the movement of emerging technological/literacy interfaces before we lose them in the blur, as we are carried along the path of communication. The desire to mark this movement’s passing finds its parallel in the editors’ organization of the collection, which begins with a section entitled "Early Paradigms." In many ways, this opening section sets us in motion for traversing the rest of the collection by tracing a few significant historical intersections between technological innovation and literacy, such as

Each of these essays demonstrates how technology has not only impacted but even prompted shifts in literacy in the past--the move obvious example being the invention of printing.  But Feinstein and Kaplan make excellent claims for thinking about how "smaller" innovations--at the level of textual poetics and the use of graphics--offer their own ways of reconceiving literacy, of making, transmitting, and understanding meaning via texts.  There is (ironically) insufficient space in this review to unpack each claim made, so suffice it to say that the sensation one arrives at from even the most cursory reading of these well-written, well-thought-out pieces is a sense of the inevitability of contemporary communication technologies--as though they finally exist to address the literacy potentials that have been lurking in human consciousness for centuries.  The movement, then, is one of progress; we’ve been going somewhere, and now we can start to see where we’re headed.

Of course, as Kaplan points out, there are still serious limitations to the technologies that "assist" our composing--limitations that might introduce their own critical blindspots, but the forward motion of this section propels us to think of the emerging cyberspace as progressive movement.

| table of contents | opening | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | connections | movement | assumptions | conclusion |