As the opening quotation suggests, a shift in the practice of literacy such as is suggested by the term, literacy online, has epochal significance: The death of one world (that of print) and its replacement by something else (the online world) signals not just a change in communication or technology but a change in civilization itself. Just what is this new world of literacy online that seems to await us, and how should we approach it—with open arms or poised for battle? Behind such questions lies a host of definitional difficulties. Surely the temptation is here for a kind of simplicity: “Online literacy” means reading and writing with a computer. But reading and writing what and how? In theory, we can read a dense, complex novel like Henry James' Golden Bowl—a work created in and designed for the privacy, solitude, and deep interiority of print culture—sitting in front of a computer terminal. Of central importance, however, is not the theoretical possibility of being able to read anything from a computer screen but whether or not readers and writers fully acclimated to the computer screen as the primary source of literacy would ever think to read, much less produce, such a work in the first place.
