The forms and functions of electronic media are exploding and the Internet is growing by leaps and bounds. Are we witnessing the most significant revolution in literacy since the invention of the printing press more than 500 years ago? Probably so. Does this mean that literacy as we have known it is doomed? Probably not. It is true that the nature of literacy itself—what it is and how it is used—is undergoing a revolutionary transformation. Most of our students are living that transformation. As David Reinking has pointed out, theirs is a post-typographic world. Most of us, on the other hand, still live in a print-based world.

Although we increasingly use the new technology and spend more time on the Internet, our conceptions of literacy are still grounded in the type of print-based world in which we became literate. We turn pages; our students scroll screens. Both conceptions of literacy are necessary as policymakers, teachers and administrators, and curriculum designers think about the implications of this revolution for literacy education. Knowing that students understand the post-typographic world better than most of the adults who teach them, what are we to make of this new technology for reading and writing?

The "pen and paper" of the post-typographic world are desktop and laptop computers, cell phones, and iPods^®/MP3 players. The Internet may be the most significant tool of all. It presents the post-typographic world in all of its multilinear, hypermedia splendor. How are print literacy and post-typographic literacy alike and different? While readers may skip around in traditional printed texts, the ways the texts in general are intended to be read still primarily follow a linear path: Readers begin at some point and continue to the end. Although readers may construct different meanings, it is still understood that they have traversed pretty much the same terrain to arrive at those meanings, whether reading a story or the steps of a science experiment.

Reading on the Internet, however, as David Bolter has noted, is multi -linear. There are innumerable paths one might take, and along the way, one will encounter various hypermedia that deliver information in different ways. Even when readers on the internet begin at the same place—a webpage, for example—they may immediately begin pursuing quite different routes depending on how they interpret and follow the many connections between texts and images: Their journey depends on the part of the screen they read, whether they scroll up or down, whether they click on one or several icons, and the links they follow. Along the way, they will encounter various hypermedia options, including streaming video and quicktime movie clips, for example.

Writing in the post-typographic world involves far more than just better spell-checkers and grammar-checkers: Like reading on the Internet, writing on the web is more fluid, active, and social. Compositions are not as "fixed" as in print-based forms, writers often invite response, and they revise in light of those responses. Increasingly, composing on the web includes the use of hypermedia as well as print-based formats.

Most print-based literacy skills will remain necessary in this post-typographic world. If possible, our efforts to teach these skills should be even more earnest and deliberate. Because of the fluidity of the medium and the formats on the web, critical skills in reading and writing on the web include learning to decode and encode, as well as learning to engage critically with content in the multilinear and hypermedia context. Indeed, the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate will be even more critical on the Internet. As we know too well, there are all manner of siren songs in the content of the web that lure readers away from critical analysis, synthesis, and other higher-level thinking skills.

As with most revolutions, the order of things is not so much overturned as transformed. Just as Microsoft's hourglass or Apple's clock face constantly remind us, the content of a new medium always begins by presenting the content of older mediums. The implications for literacy instruction are deceptively simple: While some content will include more traditionally based formats, web-based instruction must, of necessity, be more interactive and engaging. Significant research is underway that is investigating the type and nature of students' web-based experiences, and their voices must be a part of instruction. Our responsibilities, however, must also include informed guidance in helping students learn how to negotiate this new terrain. If we do it well, we will empower our students to think critically in this new multilinear, post-typographic world—while arming them with the print-based literacy skills that will provide access to and exploration of that new world.