Ours is the age of post-literacy. How does one write for a post-literate age? This question will remain unanswerable as long as we do not distinguish post-literacy from illiteracy. To be post-literate is not necessarily to be illiterate. The illiterate cannot read while the post-literate read otherwise.

Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen, Imagologies

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind.

Don Delillo, The Names

Delillo's claim about film could easily be made about computers. What was once hacker-subculture has become more-mainstream-than-mainstream, affecting culture across the board—economically, politically, socially. More than simply tools, computers have transformed the way we research, organize data, teach, learn, think, and write. For some, this situation is not one to be celebrated. But for good or ill it is happening: our culture is moving from print literacy to what Gregory Ulmer calls an age of 'electracy'. Writing is no longer simply putting pen to paper, and the relationship between writing and technology has moved beyond the days when computers were largely word-processing tools. We can still speak of writing as literacy, but we must do so with a much broader definition that includes images, sounds, colors, fonts, layout, design, (which offer a wider range for expression). But post-literacy encompasses more than adding images and colors to print essays. Following Vitanza's distinction in W4 between "hyper"-texts as print literacy made web-ready and "hypertexts" as experimental genres that are working toward post-literacy (as distinct from illiteracy), we will examine examples of both types with an eye toward what it takes to read them as well as write them.