Winnie the Pooh (or at least A.A. Milne) had an answer to that. The opening of The House at Pooh Corner starts with a Contradiction. Milne explain:
An Introduction is to introduce people, but Christopher Robin and his friends, who have already been introduced to you, are now going to say Good-bye. So this is the opposite.Does this mean that the Boidem is going away? I don't think so, nor am I trying to suggest so. Of course at some point all of this will come to an end, and will take it's place on a neglected back shelf on one of the dusty aisles of cyberspace, but that's not the intention at the moment. So if we're not going away, a contradiction isn't the right name for this. Even if here, just as in Pooh (and, sometimes it seems, along with all of cyberspace) we think "Grand Thoughts ... about Nothing", something quite different is happening here.
The introduction served, hopefully as a means of focusing on what happens here, in the Boidem. It was a means toward getting acquainted, of getting to know the territory. But hypertext is always peeking around the corner, seeking out the next click. We may be able to feel at home here, but it's never more than a home base - somewhere to return to only if we also occasionally (or often) leave. In hypertextual cyberspace intramural is confining. It even feels wrong to reside in one house for too long. Extramural is the standard. If we don't explore what's out there, we don't even really need a homebase. This, then, is an extroduction - a jumping off point. In it we will try to examine what the Boidem has succeeded in accomplishing, we'll try and see what makes it work (if it does), but we will also remind ourselves that there's lots more out there than just the Boidem, and that lots of it is worthy of a visit.
Go to: An introduction to the extroduction,
or
Go to: Web Essays - The evolution of a (personal?)
medium