Attempts to assess the influence of the web upon our intellectual and imaginative capacities have resulted in a steady stream of commentary and debate. Although the subject has been approached from a variety of perspectives, the analyses often share a lexicon of transformation, of upheaval, of the unprecedented or the inexorable. This can be true whether the arguments are of the utopian or the apocalyptic variety or the commentators speak in the voice of Pollyanna or Cassandra. Although certain aspects of web-driven change may in fact be genuinely novel (e.g., the pace of its relatively widespread adoption), some seasoned voices are beginning to conclude that many of the more radical claims made for the web have been overblown and called for more careful consideration of both its limitations and possibilities. One characteristic often shared by observers is an assumption of "information overload." This assumption is enshrined in, among other places, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, which bases its guidelines on the presupposition of "rapid technological change and proliferating information resources." The ACRL standards exemplify a much broader trend. Both the diagnosis and the treatment construe the challenges of technology and learning as essentially new and the solutions as primarily technological. From an information literacy (IL) perspective, this has typically been framed as a technical problem of "tools and skills" rather than an epistemological or social problem of reading and interpretation. A major aim of IL is assisting students to develop strategies of interpretation, and in the present digital age, that calls for criticism not only of the "content," but of the complex, evolving means by which that content is accessed.