While footnotes allow a digression from the text, hypertext links may move the reader away from the text permanently. Even the manner in which information appears on the screen may have less to do with how the publisher wishes the information to look than with how the reader instructs the browser that is being used. As electronic technologies displace print technologies as the principle means for working with information, they also displace print as the principle means for thinking about information. In addition to providing new opportu nities for working with information, they contribute to shifts in the value of information, in the language used to describe information, in customs used to employ information, in expectations about how information will be used, and in norms that are applied to information and communication. When technology is thought about in pragmatic or functional terms, it is looked at as a tool.
Tools extend our capabilities to perform certain activities.
Tools make it easier to do some acts, and accelerate how quickly an act is per formed. The new media enable us to expand in rather extraordinary ways our capabilities for processing, storing, organizing, representing, and communi cating information. In the current transition period, therefore, it is not surpris ing that the prevailing attitude is that these technologies are merely tools, artifacts whose primary impact is to accelerate greatly the performance of informational tasks. For instance, a plow, though obviously a human product, is an external object, not only in the sense that its users may fall over it and hurt themselves as a result, just as they may by falling over a rock or a stump or any other natural object. More interestingly, the plow may compel its users to arrange their agricultural activity, and perhaps also other parts of their lives, in a way that conforms to its own logic, and they may have been neither intended nor foreseen by those who originally devised it.