Abstract
The Tenth Waterloo Conference may seem an odd time to ask a naive question like the one in my title, but it is an occasion for some retrospection, and as must be clear to anyone working "in the field", in spite of these ten years spent considering, writing about, and using it, our working notions of electronic text remain as various and perhaps as confused as ever. The sudden blossoming of interest in the Internet threatens to open up what was once a snug little club of people dealing with electronic text; our numbers are likely to be overwhelmed, and our often unspoken assumptions challenged. If the history of such "mobbings" is any indication, we may fear that the good is not likely triumphantly to drive out the bad. (I would add parenthetically that this affects not only electronic text, but a whole range of issues such as "netiquette".) Thus it behooves us, while we still can, to review and re-articulate our assumptions, and perhaps give some shape to any future, unsponsored debate.