I have no doubt that we'll see oceans of multimedia junk. The bread and butter of multimedia magazines will no doubt be sex, sports, fashion, and commerce. But amid the noise and clutter, in the interstices between Virtual Valerie and auto-scanning twelve baseball games at once, we can start to build a new literacy.
Now, we could soberly pretend that we're reinventing literacy because it's necessary if the life of the mind is to survive the technology of the Millenium. But I believe that Shakespeare wrote his plays, and we still watch them, largely for the sheer enjoyment of all concerned. Life is a dance, and though intellectuals are often self-consciously clumsy and analytical about it, they're often the ones who master the most complicated and interesting steps.
