Looking for Women for a Special
“Girls of the Net” Pictorial
Sitting atop a pile of books, a most ungeekish model looks flawlessly nubile, as if part of a virtual reality tableau conjured up for Hugh Hefner himself. Playboy’s message is clear: What counts isn’t mastery of Telnet, Gopher, Lynx, or other Net voodoo. Candidates should mail or e-mail “a recent full-length body photo in a two-piece bathing suit or less and a clear face shot.”
The same day a famous hacker named Cliff Stoll goes on a Washington radio station to promote his book Silicon Snake Oil, which says the Internet steals too much time from true learning and life.
For better or worse—mostly better in my opinion, egalitarian that I am—the Internet has Arrived.
A quarter-century ago scientists dreamed up a predecessor of the network to let computers jabber to each other across the United States, even after a nuclear attack. Fearless professors followed with electronic talk on topics ranging from biology to poetry.
Now it’s as if everyone is on the Internet—not just Playboy but Penthouse, some Arizona lawyers who love to inflict junk ads on the innocent, a Florida manicurist, Democratic and Republican stalwarts, thousands of college freshmen, punk teenagers, and elementary schoolers in London, Singapore, Minnesota, Nova Scotia—you name it. In one way or other, the Net ties in to smaller networks ranging from local, bulletin board-style systems to America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, Delphi, GEnie, Bitnet, Bix, eWorld, and MCI Mail.
Fans of David Letterman and Jay Leno, the world’s most famous talk-show rivals, are even duking it out online. The cyberspace section of Newsweek regularly lists the hottest attractions of the Internet—for example, the best sites on the World Wide Web, the multimedia area where you can see pictures and hear sound.
Hollywood is gambling on a movie called The Net, and Time and Newsweek have done several cover stories. Could the Time curse be at work here? Is everything else downhill, now that the Net has landed on The Cover? Not if you go by the stats. Internet demographers love to squabble about the exact number of people on the Internet, but at the very least, some 25-30 million can reach it by way of electronic mail; and in a few years, if the braver prophets are right, hundreds of millions may be wired in. For the snobs, of course, the old cachet is gone. A humor columnist says the Net is like citizens band radio with typing.
Is the Internet, then, about to become a 500,000-channel wasteland? Just what are all these millions really doing on the Net? Some politicians would have you think that a disturbing number of Netfolks are busy corrupting the morals of minors, and shouldn’t we ban smut from the public areas of cyberspace? And if you believe some American security bureaucrats, the Net might turn out to be a haven for spies and dope dealers. “Shouldn’t Washington,” they more or less ask, “be able to snoop on pervs and subversives who scramble their messages?”