“Information patterns travel incessantly inside and outside the machine, from disk storage to active memory to output devices to other computer sites. At the end of their journey through cyberspace—each packet of information following its own itinerary—bit patters recognize themselves into letters, words, and texts. Hopefully into meanings. Sometimes the words on the loose become malleable substance in our hands, as we grab them with a hand-shaped cursor, move them, erase them, banish and recall them, pull more words from under words, cut them out and paste them into a new context; sometimes they become actors and dancers on the stage of the computer screen, animated by the script of an invisible program; sometime they fail to regroup at the end of their trip, and the screen fills up with garbage, dismembered text, visual nonsense, or surrealistic graphics. Whether we play with them or watch them perform for us, whether we control them or they rebel against us, electronic words never stand still for long, never settle down on a page, even when a copy is sent to the printer; for the printer merely outputs a lifeless replica, a still photograph of objects in motion”

— Marie-Laurie Ryan, “Introduction,” Cyberspace Textuality” (1-2)