 One of the things I've seen over and over in my work is that folks say technology in ways that don't really cohere, don't have a kind of common philosophical underpinning. Typically they mean things that have an on-off switch. That doesn't get us very far. Or they'll mean things that have to do with computer-mediated communication, but they're not able to think about it in ways that get at the real complexity or wonder of it. Usually in my work I've found that faculty and students, unfortunately, can often use the word technology when what they really mean is the way we communicate and collaborate as human beings via this electronic mediation. I taught a class at Virginia Tech last spring. It's the seminar I keep iterating on. The latest version of it is called From Memex to YouTube, Cognition, Learning and the Internet. What I really think the secret title is is, This is Your Brain on Brain. So I enjoy getting in there and thinking with students about their communicative practices online using the kinds of rich media people just enjoy tinkering with. So one day we were looking at Doug Engelbart's Mother of All Demos in this class last spring. And there's Doug Engelbart doing what we're all very used to now. He's making the words move across a computer screen. We don't think anything about it. We copy, we paste, we find and replace. You can take your word processing document and you can move the words around. It doesn't work exactly that way if you're writing it out with a pen. Even if you're using a printing press, it's movable type. But once the thing has been printed, the words don't move, I guess, unless you're making a kidnapping ransom note and you cut things out and rearrange them. So I said to my students, so look, what do you notice about the words on this screen? And I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing. I didn't really know what they were going to say. And one of my students said, the words move. I said, yeah, that's right. That's kind of interesting, isn't it? They're animated. What happens when language in a physical representation in an electronic medium is animated? And then suddenly I went, what do you do that's animated in your communication? And the student said, well, hmm, we animate GIFs. And the more we talked about it, the more we began to understand that there was a direct link between animated GIFs and the words moving on Doug Engelbart's screen. Something about the way an animated GIF was kind of the next step in the evolution of the word. And when we made that connection, they began to understand, oh, this is like what I do when I speak or when I write. But now it's an animated GIF, a compact, repeatable, movable, symbolic representation of this idea, this pointing that I'm doing. And their eyes lit up. It was great. They could understand, oh, this isn't just a new trick you do with Photoshop. This is the next thing related to our habitual practices with the technology of written language.