. . .

     For the Students and Facilitators: What and especially How I have written ... composed ... the foregoing statement is purposefully rendered to illustrate a point. I myself find it rather dull and bland, primarily because of the tone, which, at times, projects a voice, or attitude, of seriousness and pedantry. (Notice the jarring contrast between the opening full-page quote from Amy Bruckman and what follows in the first section of the 'professional' preface. And notice the differences in the formal and informal sections of the Preface to this book.) The foregoing part of this introduction is not written, as I would normally write, in a different style for my particular audience: Students. And yet, as I said, it is purposefully written in this manner. Why? So that I might illustrate a point, namely, that I--and you--can take a piece of prose that is extended over a series of pages in print and recompose it for the medium of the WWW and turn bland expository prose into a high-energy presentation. In that way I--and you--can be as Bruckman suggests "artistic instigators." Or so I would think so. This is a very tricky thing to attempt, but attempt I . . . we . . . must, because as I will explain and illustrate through out this book, the medium of electronic discourse is very, very different--so very different--from printed discourse that a piece of clear, successful exposition in print, say, in an encyclopedia, can be, an absolute failure on the Web, if simply presented there as in print; or that your essay assignment in print that received, let's say, an "A" can be an absolute failure as electronic discourse on a website. As Marshall McLuhan said: The medium is the massage. Or as I would rephrase: The container shapes the content of the message.

     By the time you get this book, my publisher and I will have established a website on which there will be supplementary and complementary files with links to each section of the printed book. (In this way, we can constantly update the site and keep in touch with you.) At that site, I will also include a file/link to this Introduction but as recomposed in a hypertext format and in part a multimedia format, so that you might see the difference between the print version here and a multimedia version of the 'same' Introduction on the Web, and perhaps might even see it as being more palatable. (I will limit what I do in terms of markup language [HTML] to the codes and techniques given in the book.) It may very well be, however, that if you are the kind of person who prefers words in print alone and in a regular font size with black ink on white paper, it will not matter at all what I--or anyone else--will or could have done to this Introduction in the electronic medium that we are about to study. I have many friends who are consistent in preferring a story told in print rather than presented in film, and who have never enjoyed a novel that has been made into a film. (As if the two genres are even comparable!) (page 5 of 8)

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