Home pages and Web sites remind us that once, before the printed page was HOT in the McLuhan (1965) sense, there were also COOL, nonlinear, interactive pages. Interfaces and Web pages resemble Talmud folios in interesting ways. Moreover, HOT pages and COOL pages represent competing notions of communication: the Hellenistic model, in which the world is an information vacuum to be filled by the communicator, and the Talmudic model, in which the world is an information plenum, absolutely full of knowledge and requiring guides and navigators.

From the time that rhetoric first differentiated itself from philosophy there has been a widespread belief that the craft of rhetoric is, to a considerable extent, the art of deception with impunity. As early as Plato's Gorgias dialogue and as recently as a proposed rule from the Food and Drug Administration, one finds those who argue that even the skills of technical and scientific communication are, in effect, artful forms of misrepresentation. These critics indict not only those who sell and apologize-easy targets-but also those those avowed purpose is merely to make messages clearer. Can it be true that all forms of communication skill, even those that enhance clarity and precision, are merely elegant forms of lying? Does the word "rhetoric" deserve its tainted historical connotation? Or, even worse, is writing itself an inherently self-serving (i.e. misleading) way of adapting to one's environment?.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

New technology has enabled the audience to shape a writer's message. Today, publishing technical information often consists of letting the receivers search the files, extract what they judge relevant, sequence and organize it any way they wish, and even print or display it to their own specifications. Often, the writer is not creating deliberately worded and presented messages but rather, feeding molecular articles to rhetorically neutral databases, from which readers may extract what they wish. Such technologies as SGML even further limit writers and deprive them of such basic presentation devices as deciding where pages will begin and end. The rhetorical implications of technology that empowers readers and enfeebles writers are reviewed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>