But if striving for vigor, subtlety, and precision in language is left behind as a relic of the pinched-bandwidth '90s, we can't dump the blame on Microsoft. With notable exceptions like Salon , Slate , FEED and Word , most commercial Web publishers have been too busy dishing up eye candy to pay writers for the kind of writing that is food for the soul. What's at stake is the Net's effectiveness as a tool for the collective creation of meaning. The idea may be banal, the fact irrelevant, the claim false, but there is no escape from meaning when language is the instrument guiding one's thought. That writing of such force is still rare on the Web is a measure of how much work we have left to do.
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