To give another example, a New Yorker article lamented the destruction of library catalogues without really telling how electronic libraries could do the job better. The article went on about the handwritten annotations on the cards, and I could see the point here. Couldn’t a card for a Civil War book include an informal recommendation for a book on Antietam or Gettysburg? Must all cross-references be official? So I could appreciate writer Nicholson Baker’s worry about the fate of those beautiful wooden cabinets. What he played down, however, is that technology can let electronic librarians create quick paths from one work to another.[[4.7]]
Far from being exotic nowadays, this technology is the essence of the World Wide Web. So if you looked up a general item on the Civil War, you might see some annotated references to an item on Antietam, and go there instantly with a click of the mouse.
Just as wrongly, an article in the Atlantic Monthly of September 1994 said future electronic books could perish because they used many disk formats. “The End of the Book?” asked the headline over T. J. Max’s doomsaying. But CD-ROMs and books on floppy disk are just transitions. Unless legislators interfere in the most ham-handed of ways, computer networks should be the natural homes for electronic books. They could reach us more cheaply, and in greater varieties, without the bottleneck of physical bookstores. So disk standards should be just plain irrelevant in the end. The true raison d’etre for the Internet is its ability to let many kinds of machines share information without the least worry about floppies or magnetic tape. Most[Most] of the time I don’t know if my no-name IBM clone is talking to a Mac or a $5-million mainframe. Besides, we mustn’t preserve books just physically; in a videocentric era we also need to help them survive in the minds of readers, particularly those outside the elite. We should spread books far and wide, then, and make the technology as friendly to words as possible.
But tell that to Max. In his eagerness to put down electronic text, Max depicted the print version of Wired magazine as hypocritical. He wrote:
Although Wired communicates extensively by e-mail with its readers, conducts forums, and makes back issues available on-line, its much-repeated goal of creating a magazine—currently called HotWired—that is especially designed to exist electronically remains fuzzy. For the moment this is no open democracy, and Wired is no computer screen—its bright graphics would make a fashion magazine envious. Wired celebrates what doesn’t yet exist by exploiting a format that does: it’s as if a scribe copied out a manuscript extolling the beauty that would one day be print.
Strange. Just what’s so odd about using old technology to spread word of alternatives, especially the dazzling e-magazines that already enliven the Web? When Nicholas Negroponte published Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), a bestselling collection of his lively Wired essays, some Generation Xers bought it not for themselves but for their parents—which was exactly what Negroponte wanted.
Max is especially off target about HotWired. Today, just months after he wrote of the publishers’ “fuzzy” goal, the magazine is one of the most successful on the Net with far more than 100,000 readers. It makes massive use of hyperlinks—the technology I described by way of the Civil War example. Within discussion areas, readers can create links from their posts to text, pictures, and sound elsewhere in the World Wide Web, including their own electronic pages—they needn’t confine themselves to tiny letters to the editor. Simply put, HotWired both praises and exemplifies the new medium.
I couldn’t care less, moreover, if this electronic magazine runs long articles that have come out in print or could have—just so HotWired also gives me new material. Not everyone on the Internet reads the printed Wired. One of joys of the Net, moreover, is the ability to offer greater levels of detail for those wanting it. What a grouch Max is. He might as well be a monk lecturing Gutenberg about the glories of calligraphy.
Even PC Magazine, one of my favorites, at times can be all wet about the Internet and related topics. A columnist suggested that most people on the Net be forced to pay for each letter sent out; supposedly, Netfolks were too quick to e-mail each other. Excuse me. Such an approach could kill off many of the mailing lists through which academics and nonacademics swap ideas and research notes en masse. A very small fee based on actual costs and Net congestion? Maybe. But not one designed to minimize use. To the columnist, however, the Net’s role as a petri dish may count less than its promise as a corporate mailman. He misses a major point. The Internet is one of the planet’s cheapest ways to transmit knowledge, including the kind that might cure cancer or give us a 150-mpg automobile. While commerce on the Net is laudable, we need those mailing lists as well—and not just for professors but public schools, libraries, charities, psychological support groups, and activists of all ideologies, to name just a few of the better examples. The economics of the Net will make this possible, especially as bandwidths increase to accommodate greater use of audio and video—text just won’t cost that much. Alas, the columnist in this instance failed to understand the Internet and its possibilities.
I myself won’t claim omniscience about the Net. Once I saw a message on a mailing list from someone pushing for a huge National Knowledge Foundation to benefit educators, librarians, journalists, and investigators. The post mentioned international topics, among others, and flares went off in my head. I posted some sharply critical, journalistic questions, wondering if the post had come from a CIA type. Some people on the list cheered me on while I pressed for public answers. It turned out that the post was from a former Company man, and as I persisted in querying Robert David Steele about his funding and motives, he sent me a colorfully worded note that might have made a Paris Island drill instructor envious. I quoted his e-mail, as I would have done if writing this up for a magazine. What a way to justify my fears of the intelligence establishment playing too powerful a role in determining the content of material online. I remembered the valuable exposés that the press had done of the CIA years ago; we need to separate U.S. journalists from spies, lest impartiality of the news media suffer. This debate I would win.