"Openness" might be an appropriate term for the first distinction. In print literature, there is what we write, and what may be read by the public. The path from the former to the latter is normally long and circuitous. And, as the publishing/entertainment industry is increasingly controlled by megacorporations bent on high profit margins, the spectrum of material that makes it to the fore in this filtration--or even wends its way along the edges of this path--is increasingly narrowed, often revolving around the act of consumption itself.* Rather than considering this sort of back-end filtration, or books going out of print and celluloid film going up in spectacular Paris flames, the dream of hypertext/media has concentrated on the front end as the site of filtration. Instead of limiting the system to which reader/writers have access, front-end filtration makes the site of selection (among the potentially infinite number of connections and documents) the locus of reading/writing. This potential infinity is the result of the co-incidence that docuverse allows between the model of literature and the model of open conversation. Anyone may publish. Anyone may link, or create a viewpoint through deliberate filtration. The connection a reader establishes between documents has the same fullness--although not the same social status--as the author's connections between these documents. No material is ever removed from the system, although it may evolve through a process of versioning, or be marked by the author as now superseded. The profit-seeking cultural gatekeeping--as well as the material impermanence--of print literature appears to be absent. Front-end filtration seems an answer to the observation Abbie Hoffman makes in Steal This Book, that freedom of the press belongs not to the person with a press, but to the person with a distribution mechanism. I was moved to think that everyone who is a part of Nelson's environment has the distribution mechanism--that in such a space the library walls recede in as many directions as we write, and as quickly. On the Web, we see the occurrence of both front- and back-end filtration. Though it certainly falls far short of Nelson's vision, and is only accessible to a limited portion of our society, the Web still provides a distribution mechanism that is in many ways significantly more open than print publication. (In fact, its relative openness has made it the target of ridicule from other media sources.) In the Web's environment, with little assistance from browsers or protocols, reader/writers have been participating in various forms of front-end filtration: we suggest sites to our friends, we construct link sections for our personal and organizational websites, we participate in Web rings, we keep our own hotlist/bookmark files. We also are continually finding that these hotlists and link sections include site addresses (URLs) that are no longer valid, because the back-end filtration of impermanence is such a salient part of the Web. At the same time, the corporatization of the Net is bringing webfiltering ever closer to that of print publishing. I think of the example of "cool sites": they began as the work of individuals, a kind of making-public of hotlists, and now are the cool shades of Yahoo and the cool fan of Gamelan; they increasingly become the work of commercial entities that depend on corporate funding and advertising. One begins to wonder if we will much longer be able to find our way to anything but corporate information, as Amazon.com pays Yahoo for links, and Yahoo makes a deal with Netscape to be included in the browser installation--the ultimate way of making it through the filtration and controlling what to "push" at us.* It will be interesting to see what kind of efforts will be made to explore new means of front--end filtering--involving more support from the Web's technologies, and producing a filtration more subtle and integrated than hotlists. It might well be possible for me to highlight the things that a friend has found interesting, as well as those Noam Chomsky recommends, or those that are important to the American Heritage Society. Though I realize that the primary interest of most Web developers would be to highlight the products of their sponsors, it might also be possible for each of us to construct a continual collaborative filtration with others, if we are willing to make the effort. Yet I realize that most current interest in Internet filtering is aimed at pushing away, not bringing near. This isn't limited to Net Nanny and SurfWatch--even the World Wide Web Consortium's Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) is conceived largely as a filtering-out. * Further, even with more democratic filtering, a significant subset of Americans might choose to take the next logical step from current television news, and filter out nearly all information about Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. I was in Japan during the Gulf War, and every discussion I have with those who were in the U.S. reveals what happens when filtration occurs differently. I will mention "The Road of Death" (the U.S. massacre of retreating Iraqis) and find a blank look, and they will name another event, and I will make the same face.