At the same time that Stoll grouses that the Internet is unedited, scores of dailies and weeklies are on the Net to one extent or another (chapter 4: Pulped Wood versus Electrons: Can the Print World Learn to Love the Net?). So’s Time magazine. Random House, Macmillan, and Time Warner are there, too, posting samples from various books, and soon people at home will be able to send credit card numbers securely over the Net and dial up the complete texts of bestsellers and other books. Even now you just might be reading NetWorld! off a screen rather than from pulped wood.
Meanwhile, a digitized cadaver on the Internet may help revolutionize the study of anatomy ([chapter 5]: Wired Knowledge: When They Let a Murderer Loose on the Internet), and in Canada, leather-jacketed teenagers are using the Net to develop their reading and writing skills.
A Mini Jargon Guide
• Electronic Mail or e-mail. You can use the Net and other networks to send messages to your friends in Peoria or Melbourne—anywhere, in fact, where Internet connections go, from Alaska to the South Pole. An electronic mailbox is just like the physical equivalent. It’s a little storage area where your messages pile up for you to retrieve when you want.
• File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. It’s a means to send or receive files from one computer to another.
• Gopher. This program lets you track down information on the Net. The word Gopher also alludes to certain Gopher-style collections of computer files. Different Gophers connect to each other through items on menus. You might start looking at an article on water pollution from a computer in Washington, D.C., see a mention of an African river, click on that menu choice with your mouse or otherwise select it, and end up at a computer in Johannesburg.
• Internet Relay Chat. It’s like a huge party line except that people are typing rather than talking. You can open up private areas, too, and reach just one person.
• Mailing Lists. To be a bit simplistic, they’re just like regular electronic mail, except that a number of people share messages, to which you can typically respond privately or with the entire list. Some lists, however, let only the moderator send out messages. Via Usenet, some mailing lists appear as newsgroups.
• Newsgroups. These are the bulletin board systems of the Net, in effect. Almost anyone can post messages there and potentially reach hundreds of thousands of people—far more than on most mailing lists, since people can read newsgroups without subscribing. The newsgroups are part of a service called Usenet, which reaches BBSs around the world, not just the Internet. No one owns this anarchy, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
• Telnet. Without leaving my regular keyboard I can operate a computer at Oxford University or the University of California by way of a procedure called Telnet. I’m remotely controlling the machines at the other end.