Marshall McLuhan's writing style has long been a source of fascination and frustration to the scholarly community. Instead of sequentially developed paragraphs and chapters, McLuhan's work often took the form of numerous free-standing commentaries, usually not more than a few pages in length, each self-sustaining yet revolving around some sort of central theme. This `holographic' style turns out to have much in common with the commentaries produced by participants in a computer conference, where individuals engage in multi-dimensional dialogue through comments of usually 20-60 lines of length around several related themes. The similarities in the textures of computer conferences and the books of McLuhan-who knew nothing about computer conferencing when he wrote his books-can aid in understanding both the computer conference as a literary form and the style of McLuhan.

From the perspective of computer conferencing, the huge network of telephone technologies already in place constitutes an essential and valuable natural resource, to be mined as effectively as possible. In the absence of telephone connections, computers could communicate long distance only by the construction of new cable and/or the development of relay (radio) technologies, either of which would render computer conferencing economically unfeasible for virtually any purpose, especially educational. With a highly sophisticated international and national series of telephone networks readily at hand, computer conferencing becomes practicable from any place on the Earth near a telephone.