Despite the challenges and discomforts of e-land, we almost cannot imagine a future without it.  

Very few people want to give up e-mail or the convenience of Web news.  Still, the popularity of applications for computer-based communication tends to obscure the larger changes taking place.  The adventure in e-land has revolutionized the reading patterns of audiences everywhere.  Early hypertext writers worried endlessly about how we were going to "teach" readers to read linked text.  Soon, though, the WWW was up and running - and everyone seemed to know instinctively how to follow a link!  

Early Storyspace Hypertext:  True North by Stephanie Strickland.

While we know that reading, and therefore writing, publishing, archiving and distribution of literature will not stay within the old, familiar borders of linear print text practices, we have no idea of how far the new frontier might extend. 

DeSoto thought he would find the inland sea, a waterway to California and the East, just beyond Atlanta.  It would be over two hundred years before explorers of the South and the Southwest would admit that there was no inland sea.  They were sometimes foolish, misguided, and often disappointed in their hopes.  We have to assume that part of the attraction was the joy of the daily discovery, the fascination with the landscape itself - the detail on the ground.  And so it might be with us. 

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© Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink // The Lore and Lay of E-land // Kessesaw State University, March, 2002