A conclusion is more appropriate to a printed text than to a hypertext. Printed text proceeds from introduction to conclusion in a linear fashion; hypertext is an infinite, rhizomic circulation of nodes. Nonetheless, the world of Gutenberg still has a certain resonance for us. Not yet fully cybernetic, we presently inhabit the space between print culture and hypertext. I therefore feel that I should make a few provisional concluding remarks.

Writing in 1979, when the Web was not yet even a glimmer in the eyes of the CERN lab's technicians, Jean-François Lyotard pointed out that "a professor is no more competent than memory bank networks in transmitting established knowledge" (Lyotard 53). Naturally, many faculty members are likely to find this possibility quite threatening. Yet surely the fear that college instructors might be rendered irrelevant by computer technology is exaggerated. After all, as Landow points out, "this technology has the potential to make the teacher more a coach than a lecturer, and more an older, more experienced partner in a collaboration than an authenticated leader" (Landow 123). This transformation of the teacher's role may make possible a very exciting new form of instruction in which the students take a much more active role in their education. We do a tremendous disservice to our students if we close our eyes to new teaching techniques simply because they threaten hierarchies of power which are, in any case, quite suspect.