Stevan Harnad:
 

The advent of the offline medium of writing, millennia ago, spelled the beginning of the end for the much earlier online oral tradition that the advent of speech had vouchsafed for the poets, scholars, and ordinary citizens of our species. Gutenberg's Press went on to seal coffin the coffin of that bygone village chat-group. But the PostGutenberg Galaxy of Scholarly Skywriting is now resurrecting a "virtual" oral tradition with an incomparably broader scope, restoring the interactivity of human minds to a turnaround time much closer to that online speed of speech for which the speed of interdigitating thought originally evolved (before it was supplanted by the offline "serial solipsism" of script). Yet Skywriting (multiple email plus hypermail web archive: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail) restores that near real-time interactivity while preserving the discipline and digital record of print (verba volunt: scripta manent) on an unprecedented global scale. Paradoxically, the ordinary citizen has picked up on this, but the scholars are still living in the Gutenberg Galaxy. I will describe ways to fast-forward them to the full potential of the Post-Gutenberg present in both research and teaching, through online self-archiving (freeing the skyreading of refereed research for one and all) and scholarly as well as pedagogic skywriting.