The rush to the Information Superhighway and the transition to an Information Age have enormous political, ethical, and religious consequences. The essays collected here develop both interdisciplinary and international perspectives on privacy, critical thinking and literacy, democratization, gender, religion, and the very nature of the revolution promised in cyberspace. These essays are essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand and reflect upon these events and issues.

This book examines interactive electronic discourse, exposing use of language that has the immediacy characteristic of speech and the permanence characteristic of writing. The authors created an asynchronous mainframe conference for language and linguistics classes in which they presented students with the task of analyzing the language used in original newspaper reports of the 1960s Civil Rights Sit-Ins. The authors observed how students wrote to each other across a wide range of social and virtual settings, how they built a real, if short-lived community within and across campus boundaries,...