What if electronic media eventually become sufficiently cheap, portable
and available that they displace print as the major medium for writing?
This would not mean that hard copy would disappear, any more than pens
disappeared when print arrived, or radio when television arrived.
But it will be moved out of its current position of primacy.
What if the "hypertext gurus" such as Stuart Moulthrop, George Landow and
Jay David Bolter are right: that hypertext will become the genre of choice
and will displace our current linear logic with an associational logic
of connections?
What if the World Wide Web affords everyone the opportunity not only to
read but also to write scholarly, creative, popular, and workplace hypertext?
If these predictions are at least partly true, then we as teachers have
a mission to figure out how this kind of text will work, and to help our
students to learn the rules of this new language game.