A Paragraph on the Life of Professor Author A. Link
 

Schooled at the onset of the PC era, Prof. Link might well have taken up the traditional blackboard, lectern, and index cards as the sacred tools of his trade. He suffered not for salutary exemplars and cautionary specimens– of the well en-tweeded professoriate. Accidents of the age, perhaps, the manual Royal typewriter gave way to the primitive "word-processor" and the stately groves of academe sprouted unheard of vocabularies: gopher, mud and moo, but worse bitnet, Usenet, surfing, and logging-on. Swept up in the heady, utopian imaginings of "virtual communities" he came to truly read, and know, to write and teach literature within this digitized ethos.

So with a wireless lithium notebook, and a fountain pen for the touch of anachronism, Prof. Link (probationary assistant professor to be accurate) doubtless leads his young educatees through the contemporary obstacles of so-called information literacy. The great books of the Gutenberg era, he patches to students' own words and the otherstream voices of unheard traditions. The just graying soul makes it an article of faith that to profess any knowledge during the end-stage of modernism is to assume the position of the bricolage artist, the technician of miscellany, the wireless router in a distributed system where students are neither the terminals nor access points, but the ceaseless data flow itself.