What ratoons will emerge from the root of today’s changed academia? If the current trend of the Internet assuming an increasingly prominent role as a medium of academic communication continues, many of the ground rules of scholarship will begin to change. As Lyotard and others [Coyne, 1995] suggest, there will be further blurring of the line between theory and practice in scholarship. This should not be such a shocking development. As many new media have come to be seen as legitimate topics for scholarship (film and other pop culture media), the internet and performative works of hypermedia are also logical realms for research.

Interconnected network technologies will play an increasingly central role in scholarly communication. Electronic works are nevertheless unlikely to be included in the core categories of dissertations and tenure review materials until the second decade of the 21st century. This shift to the Internet as a scholarly medium will resolve many (but not all) of the current pragmatic economic problems in academic communication systems. Paralogy, or the subsidized access to large data banks within broad segments of higher education is both likely and a trend that can lead to worthwhile new categories of academic research.

Perhaps the elephant cannot be tamed, but it can be our partner. When the Postmodern Age some day finally becomes defined in terms it can call its own, and not just as the mysterious something that came charging up in the wake of Modernism, then the blind men will likely understand it by means of an electronic canvas. The current experiments with hypermedia scholarship on the Internet are the incunabula of this emerging medium. This remains a task for the future sighted generations, for the moment we must content ourselves with fleeting brushes with ears and feet and leave the apprehension of the whole beast for another day.