Not every writer would be open-minded, of course; even Fillmore at first had feared hypertext. When O’Reilly and Associates put one of her papers on the Web through _GNN_—spreading around her observations on electronic publishing—she saw all kinds of links. By clicking on blue letters, for example, readers would call up material about a founder of Internet. Fillmore felt as if a Philistine had taken her beautiful bowl, her self-contained piece of writing, and turned it into a colander. Some writers might see a parallel in another way: Suppose the colander leaked readers, who, seeing the links, dove off into another area of the Net, and _never_ returned. Fillmore had adjusted to this possibility, and I could, too. Just like Zonker Harris I was of the “May the best server win!” mentality, except that I refused to confuse popularity with merit. Books weren’t like sports servers. From society’s viewpoint, another issue presented itself here. Both Fillmore and I wondered about the damage that television and computers might be doing to people’s attention spans. “Attention deficit disorder seems to have arisen at the same time that computers have spread to the home and office,” she said, “and I don’t think that’s an accident. How many people age twelve and younger are capable of reading 300 pages of sustained argument about anything?” Another worry arose, too, in my mind. Like Frank Daniels, I realized that an entire generation of children was spending more time gazing at computer and TV screens than they devoted to books and traditional newspapers. I felt that technology was destiny, that Washington and other governments should promote computers that encouraged the receptive to read e-books hour after hour. Too much of the new-style education, as envisioned by many, would be task oriented—would be _training_ as much as _education_ per se. That was fine for technical matters where, for example, a future factory worker might want to learn the basics of engine design. Hypertext was superb. The student could study a diagram of a diesel engine, click on an individual part, and read and hear a detailed explanation of its function. But I wanted technology that also encouraged people to read and absorb whole books. If book readers were too small a minority, then countries such as the United States would be less democratic and more oligarchic, with the elite all too able to manipulate the other citizens. Some social critics such as Neil Postman demonized technology as a source of mindless distractions for the masses. I, however, saw opportunity if we acted soon enough before we lost more children to TV. That meant sharp screens, smaller, lighter machines, and other advances—which would come sooner or later, but which could be hastened by the coming of a focused procurement program. Washington should assure the Valley a market for the right hardware. It should also try harder to help schools absorb it, so the machines wouldn’t just sit idle in closets.