These comments came at just the moment when the importance of computer-based communication was exploding. Indeed, in the eight or nine years from the inception of Infinite Jest to its publication, the Internet had gone from a tool primarily for academics and the technologically adept to something approaching the limitless repository of information it is today. Few novelists or cultural critics had had time yet to think about what this transformation meant, least of all Wallace, and he was surprised to learn he had written a cybernovel. Asked by the Chicago Tribune whether his book was meant to
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