Then high tech wouldn’t pose such a problem to nontechie consumers and to computerphobic women and minorities. A study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology showed that 94 percent of the surveyed users on the Web were male and 87 percent were white. With less-threatening hardware and proper training of the right people, however, schools and neighborhood libraries could help bring a much wider segment of society on the Net. Cliff Stoll is aware of the possibilities here. He knew two years ago of my TeleRead proposal to improve the content of the Net, get many more people online, and spread the electronic books around from the very start. How much easier it must be for him to eulogize old wooden card catalogues and avoid a nasty tangle with lobbyist-cowed politicians and bureaucrats.

Touring NetWorld! Yourself—Via the Web

Webfolk, check out the Internet Underground Music Archive, White Rabbit Toys, electronic magazines, and many of the other Net delights I’ve described in this book. Just use your Netscape, Mosaic, or other browser to go to

http://www.webcom.com/~prima/networld.html

You’ll find there a list of various Web sites mentioned here in the pulped wood NetWorld!—and perhaps some informal updates. You can reach the sites immediately. Just click on the hypertext links. People at the other end may change the links, but I’ve made them as up-to-date as I could.

If you would like Net addresses of some of the people mentioned in this book, go to

http://www.clark.net/rothman/pub/networld.html

Perhaps you’ll also want to see a detailed electronic version of my TeleRead proposal for a well-stocked, cost-justified national digital library. It could let ordinary readers dial up the entire texts of copyrighted books from home for free without cheating publishers and writers. For more on TeleRead, check out the hyperlinked Net incarnation of my chapter in a forthcoming book Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier (Cambridge, Massachusetts, M.I.T. Press, 1995):

http://www.clark.net/rothman/pub/telhome.html

Bashing technology, of course, is hardly new. In 1854 a writer complained: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” He said that “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through to the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”[[1.8]] Henry David Thoreau was the writer and the words appeared in Walden.