In fact, institutional and economic forces will have a major influence on how electronic technologies are adapted to our needs. Within universities, institutional imperatives will slow and distort the effect of the technologies for years to come. For example, it is easy to say that traditional publication is dead and that an era of electronic communications has arrived. We may wish that this were true and think that technology demands that it be true, but the needs of the academy for the certification of scholars and scholarship will continue.
Universities do change, but the change often occurs because of individual acts of foolhardy courage.
In the English Department Library a senior professor talks to a newly-hired assistant professor who says she wants to use computers as an essential part of her work, not just for word processing and email. Don't be the first person to come up for tenure in English with a portfolio of electronic publications. Hold off on that hypertext, multi-authored edition of Hamlet. Do the monograph on the image of the king in Shakespeare - that will prove you are one of us. The computer project won't work out the way you picture it, and, even if it did, the tenured faculty will not see it as showing what you and you alone can do.