I was bringing up the academic problem--not just reading, but reading and then thinking and writing about what one has read.

Also, just suppose one was doing an overview of my net writing. Google groups turns up 36,400 posts that I've written. I'm far from the most prolific person on line, and most of those posts are fairly short. Still, that's rather a lot, and I wonder how much you'd have to read to do adequate context for them, especially if you wanted to evaluate what I've occasionally said about newsgroups.