We must
be wary of the rhetoric of the electronic sublime. We must look skeptically at myths of future digital revolutions. Many times, we dream of what a certain technology will do for us, and it turns out to be something that we wish we'd do for ourselves. The electric light, for example, was once imagined to be a revolutionary force for human culture. It was said that having electric lights in the home would produce a host of family cottage industries, allowing the husband to spend more time in the house, and thereby lowering divorce rates. The phonograph, when invented by Edison, was intended as a way to record one's personal thoughts and send them to friends. Television was originally hailed as a revolution for education. The original predictions about the potentials of hypertext now read like similarly strange dreams. When hypertext theorists embraced it as the embodiment of post-structuralism, their wish was, perhaps, for more authors to write texts amenable to those theories.
