Crucially, however, it is the relationship among textuality, competence and power that sets those who see literacy as democratizing, empowering of ordinary people against those who see it as elitist, divisive, a source ofinequality. Today's anxieties over the digital divide merely represent the latest steps in a long-standing struggle between critical and enlightenment positions whose outcome will influence who will have the power to benefit from information and communication in a technologically-mediated twenty-first century.