Several chapters in this collection draw our attention to the dizzying pace of technological change, the real shock of the new. Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe, in a beautifully measured piece, note “the increasing speed of change and the increasing alienation that scholars are beginning to recognize as an outgrowth of such instability” (190). Listening to his students helped Dickie Selfe “move [his] attention away from the digital environments themselves and toward the inevitable struggle to live with the changes those environments produce in our personal and working lives” (308). And Michael Day seems less than thrilled about speed and information overload, wondering “If we are in such a hurry, is sustained, considered written thought possible?” (265-266). I’m heartened to read these scholars thinking about marshalling our energies. I have energy for craft, certainly, but none to spare on virtuosity. I need to concentrate on content, knowing my song well before I start singing.
      I like, then, how Galin & Latchaw want to privilege use-value rather than exchange-value in their notion of what the internet can do, rating work published there by its intellectual merit rather than publisher- or institution-based imprimatur. But they take usefulness to an unfortunate extreme: in their dream of a smart search engine, one that “would identify several hundred interrelated articles, book chapters, and webbed resources, rate them on the basis of user-specified criteria, select a predetermined number of texts, embed specified patterns of hypertextual links among the selected texts, and present the searcher with recommended strategies for reading based on search criteria and previous search requests by that searcher or by other users” (296). Such a streamlined scholarship takes that wonderful vicissitude-effect out of searching, those accidents that lead to kooky new knowledge. I’m thinking of the barely-related but intriguing books I find on the shelf underneath the one that holds the book I originally went to get (which become infinitely more valuable), the unrelated article that just happens to be in the same musty copy of the old journal containing the article I meant to find (which I end up citing for years after the intended source is forgotten) – those are sources that I would never want to preclude, which I want as part of every search. The CDs Amazon.com thinks I'd like I almost never like. One of Dickie Selfe’s students complains of the pre-digested stuff you already find online: “This just has the air of . . . fakeness is the word that springs to mind. There is the challenge of the hunt, of physicality that is lost here” (324).
     So when Victor, for example, grooves to the new electric (“I know that when I am on the Web clicking, linking, from one site to another, I sense intermittently this collapsing of time and space. I can jump from Tokyo to New York to Sidney to Palermo to elsewhere to elsewhere” [89]), I can’t help but think he’s looking for a geographic solution to an aesthetic problem (that of the need to find cool content, which, of course, can be found anywhere). What is Victor ultimately prizing but speed (a value I find utterly bullshit, an ecocidal parody of masculinity)? I’d rather write and teach in a canoe than a jet-ski, now and forever. The point is the momentary contingency of the setting, not the rushing buzz of the transport. Speed and connection are not key values for me; connect to what, whom?

-geoff