There were a few catches. You needed a deluxe Net connection, alas, which Sue lacked. So she and Greg would still have to reach out and touch type to each other. That wasn’t so bad, actually. They were saving their e-mail, and someday the files would remind them of all the promise, all the anticipation, that the Net had held out for them in the form of each other. Although I tinkered with The Internet Phone, I preferred electronic mail, just as I’d normally favored international Morse code over voice during my amateur radio days. Now that art might be lost. Code didn’t matter as much on the airwaves as before. The U.S. Coast Guard was phasing it out. Any future SOS would apparently be in bits and bytes rather than in dots and dashes, assuming the initials remained at all. What would also perish—writing on screens, eventually? Just what would happen to typed words on the Net? Whether seriously or just as a discussion provoker, a Seattle columnist had imagined the following: “It’s the year 2020; your daughter Emily is nine years old and she can’t read or write. Is this your worst nightmare about our schools come true? Nope, Emily just doesn’t need to read or write anymore.” That, of course, was exactly the kind of nightmare I’d had on my mind in proposing TeleRead. We needed graphics, not just words; but surely we could do better than the Emily scenario. I’d asked Avodah Offit for comments on net.love rather than on the effects of the technology in general, but she couldn’t help warning about the almost inevitable transition of the Net to sounds and images for all. Delighted by the renaissance of writing on networks, she’d e-mailed me: “I think two-way TV will bring us down to earth. It will be a loss rather than a gain to those of us who enjoy using our imaginations and our writing skills. Right now we all have an opportunity to use the literacy that humans have spent thousands of years developing.” That was how I felt, too, whether the topic on the Net was romance or gerbil care. An old pop lyric came to mind: “These are the good old days.” I wondered about the Snubbites and how they would have felt about Greg and Sue and the many others the Net had brought together; about the leather-jacketed kids up in Nova Scotia who, for the first time in their lives, were looking forward to _writing_, however rudimentary the elite Snubbites might have considered the children’s prose; about all the love letters that might go unwritten if TV-centric politicians let Emily and friends live out their lives as illiterates without electronic books or keyboards or equivalents. Some things were forever worth our being reactionaries in an enlightened way. Literacy was one of them. We mustn’t ever let the romance and civility of the written word die on the Internet.