e coin - each with their own purpose and natural rhythms? Speech might be more appropriate in casual settings, for example. Writing, on the other hand, with its arduous and thoughtful construction of sentences over months and even years, is perhaps better suited to situations where the writer needs to pace herself and consider carefully the logical flow and content of the work. Considered in this light, we could conceivably argue that the speedup of academic discourse will have a negative impact on the quality of our intellectual work. There are other problems as well. Perhaps, as Harnad suggests above, the effects of media on human consciousness are arguable. But these effects have not been satisfactorily demonstrated. At one point he makes some vague reference to the historical work proving the transformative potential of media. But this record, as small as it is, has been challenged. Some have argued successfully that media transformation and any "revolutionary" potential the technologies might claim have been successfully incorporated into existing socio-political formation (Mosco, 1989). Others, like Winston (1986), are more explicitly condemning about the use of anecdotal evidence and the lack of historical sophistication in arguments about the "revolutionary" impact of information technology. Describing his own reasons for undertaking a project of historical revision and technological prognostication, Winston makes the following comments. The present text [is] largely in response to a dominant tendency in the literature on electronic communication devices, both popular and scholarly, which uses an erroneous history, both implicitly and explicitly, as a predictive tool. Unfettered by much understanding of the past beyond the anecdotal, many currently propound insights into our future in the form of trajectories from our past (Winston, 1986: 27).Indeed, historians began to see centuries of continuity instead of technological waters...
