After reading Hayles essay I thought a lot about my history with footnotes. My experience with literature mostly included footnotes that were citings to other texts. What I learned from this is that you don't need to read a footnote. But then I met some useful footnotes (alas, more reading). Publishers of Shakespeare texts often have an entire page of footnotes for every page of story, all translating the definitions of the words that Shakespeare uses that are no longer recognizable to us.