The most obvious answer to this question would be to underline the huge impact of the Internet on research on the Middle East: the speed with which material is circulated among colleagues, reviewers, and editors; the increasing availability of documents and materials; the ease of access to scholarly work through online databases; the availability of scholarly forums (such as H-Net) for exchanging information and views; and a long list of other benefits. My own correspondence with a publisher and some journal editors in the past few months is a case in point: a seven-month strike declared by postal and other public-sector workers to protest the Palestinian Authority's nonpayment of salaries stopped all mail services to and from the occupied territories. Without the Internet (and private mail carriers) I certainly could not have published what I did manage to publish in these turbulent times. There are more substantive implications of Internet developments for scholars of the Middle East, and I would like to focus on two of them in the short space allowed here.