ABSTRACT
Inveterate ‘netsurfers’ typically believe that electronic communication has removed all the material obstacles that have traditionally prevented scholarship from enjoying universal access and immediate impact. If you are one of these people, the odds are that your computer is connected to a university or corporate mainframe, which means that you are not directly charged any user’s fees and you rarely suffer from delays in transmission. However, if you log on through a modem connected to your telephone, then the ‘information superhighway’ fast loses its reputation for being a frictionless medium of thought. Depending on your location, telephone access fees can mount up very quickly, and the rate structure of commercial electronic carriers may force you into a suboptimal service that frequently suspends your messages in limbo while those of premium customers zip back and forth. Finally, if you are a technophobic scholar lacking connections to a major institution, the Internet merely widens the gap between you and the rest of the intellectual world.
