• The World Wide Web. It’s the area of the Net that not only lets you read text but also see pictures, hear sounds, and even take in short clips from movies. Like Gophers, sites on the World Wide Web connect with each other. A program that lets you navigate the Web is known as a browser. Among the more popular browsers are Mosaic, Netscape, and Lynx (the latter, alas, won’t let you instantly enjoy pictures).
Also, the Net, in the opinion of many, is mocking Orwell’s predictions (chapter 6: Governments and the Net: Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong). Some serious threats remain—such as the efforts of American bureaucrats to make the Net more friendly to snoopy cops—but 1995 is a long way from 1984. What’s more, the Internet doesn’t offer just sex.
Love, too, can thrive. The persistent may indeed find wives and husbands on the Net (chapter 7: The Electronic Matchmaker).
This all happens on my Internet—anyway the one I’ll describe here. Let me offer an inevitable caveat, however: The Net is too vast for one writer to cover everything. So I won’t bother with Internet Relay Chat, where you instantly see the other people’s typing. As a temporary habitué of these regions, J. C. Hertz started to regard the Internet as “a Sartrean hell—too many people talking at one time.”[[1.7]] Yes! Net chat brings Hemingwayesque accounts from witnesses to Japanese earthquakes or Russian coups, and I’m happy it’s around for the aficionados, especially net.lovers, who can retreat to their own private channels; but I myself favor electronic mail and newsgroups, which I can read on my own terms without parrying incessantly with dyspeptic strangers half a planet removed. I promise, dear readers: I’ll inflict nary a chat transcript on you.
Certain omissions, however, really pain me. Given more time, I’d have loved to cover the growth of the community network movement. For free, in many cities, you can open up an Internet account and tap into electronic libraries all over the world or receive electronic mail. Best of all, “communets” can bring communities together. The Net is one of the big lures to get people online, but once there, they may be able to fetch the schedule of their local public radio stations, find out about local charities, and talk back electronically to officials of city halls.
What’s fascinating is the resemblance between these local nets and the Net at large. People on both would rather chat with other citizens than swap e-mail with the politicians or other celebrities. And why not? Communets are communities, just as the Net, serving so many interests, is a series of communities. Alas, Stoll does not appreciate the possibilities here.
Stoll is an astronomer, not just a hacker, and his makes me feel as if he is using a scratchy pair of binoculars to look for life on Mars. Fixated on negatives, he has downplayed even the obvious: the Net equivalent of Martian mountains. Has Stoll dropped by alt.music.chapel-hill, or rec.arts.dance, or alt.christnet.christianlife, or the Dallas Virtual Jewish Community Center Home Page, or the American Ireland Fund, or the Voter Education Project? And how about the thousands of other Web pages in which individual Netfolks can share with the world their love of families and pets, or gardening, or , or old Chevies, or whatever else they enjoy, at or away from their computers? Item by item, those are tiny, almost invisible slices of Netlife; but en masse, they rise up as mountains.
Yes, yes, sex areas thrive on the Internet. But it is that way offline, too; do snack-food stores turn millions each year off Chaucer or Playboy? Of course Chaucer himself could be randy at times, as could Shakespeare and Joyce and hundreds of other literary greats—an inconvenient fact for the American ayatollahs who hope to censor the Net.
The biggest irony here is that the Internet can actually promote Family Values and strengthen real neighborhoods. As George Gilder and others have noted, the new technology can serve people’s exact needs rather than just dish out the standard sex and violence so beloved to TV networks. The Net is Example One in my opinion—especially The Barcroft School and Civic League page on the World Wide Web. Several thousand people live in the Barcroft area of Arlington, Virginia, near Washington, D.C. It’s neither a slum nor a glitzy, status-crazed neighborhood, just a good place to raise the families that the ayatollahs love to extol. An old Methodist church has served as a community house. Now an electronic equivalent is on the Web, complete with a color photo of the church building; people can catch up with neighborhood news and learn of ice cream socials.
I’m writing this paragraph just before the Barcroft Fourth of July parade. The word from the World Wide Web is that Susan O’Hara Christopher will be the Grand Marshall. People can enjoy Nancy Tankersley’s watercolors of past parades, or “Jim Lande’s famous tree trunk sculpture. Games for the kids, no political campaigning, hot dogs and lemonade, the new Barcroft tee shirts and lots more!” The higher the percentage of Netfolks among the citizenry, the more Fourth of July bulletins we’ll see in cyberspace.