Contents
| A Note to Visitors (and Natives) | v | |
| Acknowledgments | vii | |
| 1 | The Terrain | [1] |
| 2 | Business on the Net: | |
| From White Rabbit Toys to “Intel Inside” | [27] | |
| 3 | EntertaiNet: A Few Musings on Net.Rock, | |
| Leonardo da Vinci and Bill Gates, | ||
| Bianca’s Smut Shack, and David Letterman | ||
| in Cyberspace | [80] | |
| 4 | Pulped Wood versus Electrons: | |
| Can the Print World Learn to Love the Net? | [105] | |
| 5 | Wired Knowledge: | |
| When They Let a Murderer Loose on the Internet | [172] | |
| 6 | Governments and the Net: | |
| Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong | [208] | |
| 7 | The Electronic Matchmaker | [291] |
| Notes | [327] | |
| Index | [335] | |
A Note to Visitors
(and Natives)
Everyone in NetWorld! is real, even me. Chapter 1 tells how to reach some good people who let their electronic addresses go on the Web site for this book.
In a few cases—most notably “Sue” and “Greg” in Chapter 7—I’ve guarded my subjects’ privacy with aliases and changes of identifying details. Asterisks show up after the first occurrences of their revised names.
Please note, too, that I’ve smoothed out people’s informal online prose to accommodate the printed page. A “smiley” on the Net is a good quick way to show a smile or frown; but I couldn’t think of anything uglier in print than a series of symbols such as :-). So even in quotes, I’ve used them sparingly.
I wish Mark Twain were alive and cruising the Internet at 28.8 kilobits per second; I’d love to see how he’d have handled net.dialect.
David Rothman,
rothman@clark.net
Alexandria, Virginia