Above is the original world wide web test pattern for the graphical interface (as opposed to text-only), dated 1994-95.In my teaching, I was a passionate user immediately. In 1995, I wrote a short piece for a newspaper - and it was later published in an online magazine (unusual in those days) - that was essentially a negative review of a book that fretted about the then-emergent internet and its alleged destructive effect on reading. In the final paragraph of this brief essay, I wrote about what was then called "the world wide web":
"Authors and teachers have as a new tool a kind of text that can 'meander' by virtue of its form as well as its content, literally urging the reader to make choices at every turn. To the extent that we can resist the easy characterization of this mode of reading and learning as inhuman and "dictatorial" - with its anxious view of cultural authority as residing not in the individual creator of text but in the creator of the system syntax - then, I think, we will be better able to face a few of our problems as educators."
The whole essay (just a few pages long) is still available on the outmoded web site of XConnect here. The citation is XConnect ([pronounced "cross connect"], vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 1995).
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
