As Richard Lanham has pointed out, English professors have a role to play in the advent of the age of electronic communications, but the need for them has been obscured by the focus on science and technology. As rhetoricians, we have much to say about the ways computers are affecting texts and the uses of language in texts. As theorists and critics, we are already addressing the deeper sea changes in thought that are unfolding. Art and literature often prefigure social changes, and postmodernism prefigures the development of computer technology. Much recent theory in literary studies is remarkably congruent with the issues raised by theorists about the impact of computers, even though the literary theory predates the advent of the personal computer.
English professors understand that new ways of thinking and being are in large part old ways.
We can best contribute to the future of our students by stressing continuities with the past. My sense of the needs of students is at odds with the classrooms I teach in and the way I am expected to do my own work. We are preparing students for the twenty-first century, but teaching and writing in the modes of the nineteenth century. The formal essay in the composition classes is ill-suited to students who will spend their lives composing electronic hypertexts with images and sounds as well as words. Our colleagues in other departments and the public won't look kindly on your abandoning the conventional essay and the conventional class.