I am not speaking in the purely technical sense. Telegraphic tickertapes came in long before computers, so formally speaking there is nothing new about reading against a moving stream of letters, or even pixels. Animated text in movie titles and TV advertisements is part of everyone's reading experience these days. Nonetheless, the query ticker does raise that familiar bird-or-dinosaur question fundamental to electronic text: is it type or is it video? Whatever we call it, this text is basically dynamic in a way that type is not. As Michael Joyce has usefully observed, "electronic text replaces itself." Bit follows bit, here visibly crossing the screen. But since in the original version every entry was linked to Web content (a feature lost in my poor imitation), the flow of words pointed to something beyond its own replacement. Its unpredictable variety indicated the enormous sixe of the Web, the largest writing project in human history, and its constant self-replacement signified the Web's dynamic of relentless expansion.

Those of us who learned to read in a pre-PC world (the only thing boomers and Gen-X have in common) may have a hard time with this concept. Our symbols of textual vastness are the Library of Congress, Sterling Memorial, or the Bibliotheque Nationale. For good and ill, we are still book people. We have almost as much difficulty thinking about billions of documents as we do reading words that dance across the screen. Yet the Web seems to demand both of these perceptual tricks, making the query ticker a very interesting primer for digital literacy. As I like to say to my students, if you can read this, you're getting close.