ABSTRACT
By accelerating the rate of information exchange, the Internet has accelerated change in many aspects of life that might seem unrelated to the Internet itself. Think of the rate of change in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last few years. Advances and declines of 100 points in a day are common now, due at least in part to the number of investors who now do their own buying and selling, made possible by Internet access to trading software and a tidal wave of investment news flowing from the Internet. The Internet has also affected other areas of life. Another manifestation of the accelerating flow of information made possible by ubiquitous and ever-faster Internet connections is the current configuration of information presented by CNN, MSNBC, and Bloomberg, based on a computer-screen metaphor of multitasking. Here the talking head is in the upper right corner of the screen, with a sidebar graphic flush left highlighting what is being said; unrelated information scrolls along the bottom, just above the most recent sports scores, with the weather presented as a graphic somewhere else on the page, while time ticks away bottom right. A screen that busy with unrelated information would have been rejected as chaotic 5 years ago. Now it seems that people have come to expect a steady flow of ever-changing information. Because so much else is going on, one has to tell a news "story" differently. There is very little room left for narrative or for editorial commentary, just for images and sound bites. Given that the Internet has become a pervasive
form of communication that is having a formative effect not only on what people do but also on how people think and write, it is not surprising that it has also changed the way that technical and professional writing is taught. Nearly all of us teach in a wired environment, and publication via the Internet has entered the standard curriculum. We all teach Web design to some extent. When we teach documentation, many of us now teach online help. And whereas desktop publishing has made graphic design a significant element of many technical and professional writing courses, the possibilities of movement and color that the Internet enables have encouraged entire courses in visual rhetoric. Clearly, the Internet is changing what we teach and what we know.
