These are the unedited versions of columns written for the now-defunct 
Computer Life magazine, a Ziff-Davis publication. 
-----------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Swim with the Research Sharks (c) June 1995, Reva Basch
 
Surfing the Internet, poking around the World Wide Web... all that stuff is 
like a lazy soak in a hot tub compared to the way some cybernauts navigate 
the info-sea. We're talking icy and turbulent waters here, with crashing 
waves and brutal undertows. Oh, and sharks. Don't forget the sharks. 

Imagine, to start with, an Internet site that's password-protected. You sign 
a contract -- offline! with a pen! -- and receive your personal secret key. 
At last, you address the sacred data-lode in a highly ritualized tongue 
called Boolean:

      ss (designer or upscale or high()end) (5n) (pen? ? or
      writing()implement? ? or pc=395101);l/1994:1995/USA. 

Pretty bizarre, huh? But if you're lucky, and if you haven't dropped a 
parenthesis or something equally disastrous, a collection of detailed, useful 
articles on designer fountain pens will coming scrolling up your screen. If 
you blow it... well, that's where the sharks come in. They're lurking down 
there, right around the bottom line. They take a bite every minute, or for 
every question you pose. They chomp you again on the output end, whether 
you've gotten useful results or not. Typically you'll end up paying anywhere 
from $20 or so for a quick search and a couple of stories to hundreds of 
dollars for a major effort that yields several dozen hits. 

What we're looking at here are the heavy-duty professional database services 
like Dialog, Lexis/Nexis and Dow Jones News/Retrieval. Ross Perot gave Nexis 
a plug in one of his campaign speeches; boy, did system usage go north the 
next day! Bill Safire, the wordsmith at the Sunday _New York Times_, runs 
terms like "infotainment" through Dialog or DJN/R to pinpoint when they were 
coined and how often they've appeared in print. To librarians and 
professional researchers, these online services are indispensible tools of 
the trade. They contain information that you can't get anywhere else on the 
Net. 

Dow Jones News/Retrieval, for instance, gives you the complete _Wall Street 
Journal_ going back more than ten years, plus stock quotes and detailed 
corporate financials. Dialog lets you do your own patent and trademark 
searches, monitor trends in medicine, science and technology, or browse 
business publications ranging from _Nation's Restaurant News_ to _Toy & Hobby 
World_. Lexis/Nexis offers the complete text of legal cases, plus dozens of 
newspapers -- including 15 years' worth of the New York Times -- and hundreds 
of special-interest magazines from the U.S. and abroad.

Those are the big three "supermarket" databases. There are others, like 
DataTimes for newspapers and business news, and Data-Star for chemistry, 
pharmaceuticals and European business information. There are "boutique" 
services, too, that cater to specialized tastes. NewsNet, for instance, 
focuses on newsletters, the kind that often cost hundreds of bucks a year for 
a print subscription. Burrelle's Broadcast Database
deals in transcripts of news, talk and public service programs. Haven't you 
always wanted a searchable database of _Geraldo_? What about _60 Minutes_? 
Ah, you're beginning to see the possibilities... 

When you hook up with a pro-level online service, part of what you're paying 
for is *control* -- the information is organized and maintained in a way that 
most net-sites are not. It's like the difference between a well-run library 
and a rummage sale. Plus, these services are firewalled against tampering; 
data integrity isn't the issue it is on the wider Net. Finally, there's added 
value in the form of sophisticated search tools and
indexing that let you hone in on exactly what you're looking for. 

Services like Dialog and Nexis aren't as fun and intuitive as browsing the 
World Wide Web. If you suspect that I have a love/hate relationship with 
them, you're right. But they do have a certain macho, Schwarzenegger-like 
appeal. And they're getting easier to use, with enhancements like natural 
language searching that'll let you drop the Boolean incantation and just say 
"Get me some information about designer fountain pens." 

If you're intrigued by any of these industrial-strength online services, call 
and ask them to send you the glossy brochure, the cost breakout, a training 
schedule and -- most important -- a list of the available databases with a 
description of each. Choosing a database service is a lot like shopping for a 
computer: First, decide what you want to *do* with it. Plucking references 
for your kid's term papers is one thing; managing your investment portfolio, 
patenting your invention or keeping tabs on your corporate competitors is 
something else again. 

Okay, you warm-water Web-surfers, time to check out the *big* waves. The 
water's fine, really -- once you <brrrr....> get used to it.
------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: The Making of a Cybernaut, (c) Reva Basch, July 1995

There's a yellowing cartoon tacked to my office wall. It shows two guys in an 
office cube surrounded by computers and cables, modems and phone lines. One 
is saying to the other, "You're all plugged in. You can never miss a call, 
forget an appointment, lose a document or be out of touch again... God help 
you."

What I've been wondering lately is "How did I turn into that guy?" I sure 
didn't start out that way. I was an English major, not a net-head. Even in 
library school, I resisted the courses in catalog automation and what was 
then called "online bibliographic retrieval," opting instead for storytelling 
and children's lit. 

Somewhere along the line, though, I got seduced. Online database
searching, the forerunner of what's now known as info-surfing, invaded my 
professional domain. Suddenly, I could search vast electronic libraries in a 
single bound. Instead of spending hours poring through print indexes, hauling 
magazines off the shelves, and standing in line at the photocopier, I could 
type in a few keywords and, within seconds, pull out more than you'd ever 
want to know about the diet soft drink market, executive outplacement 
strategies, or emergency treatment for anaphylactic shock. 

I didn't realize it at the time, but I'd taken my first tentative steps into 
cyberspace. 

The joys of email began to reveal themselves. Email filled a
communications niche halfway between a casual comment and a phone
call. It was more permanent than both, but far less committal than pen-and-
ink. I loved both the immediacy and the space it gave me to frame the right 
response. It dawned on me, as business contacts transformed themselves into 
social ones, that this new medium possessed some powerful juju. It had less 
to do with gathering information than with making connections among people -- 
connections that wouldn't have happened otherwise. 

From that stage, it was just one small step into cyber-citizenhood. I plunged 
into The WELL, a virtual society teeming with allies and antagonists and 
innocent bystanders, flame-throwing terrorists and pillars of the community, 
hookers and preachers and loonies. I felt right at home. It was a 
sociological spaceship filled with hundreds of twisty
little minds, and ripe with shared history and subtext.
  
Okay, so it *can* get a wee bit claustrophobic. When it does, I open up the 
pod bay doors and tool on out to the larger Net. First it was Gopherspace 
that beckoned, then the anarchy of the alt.newsgroups. I subscribed to a 
couple of prolific listservs and discovered the cure for the empty mailbox 
blues. Lately, I'm been weaving my way through the World Wide Web, 
bookmarking cool URLs like a bird-watcher with her life list.

How did I learn to talk like this? When did I become that guy in the cartoon?

Let me be explicit: I live much of my life online. My modem is busy several 
hours a day, logging in to databases, emailing with half the world, 
schmoozing around the virtual water cooler, plumping up the sofa cushions in 
my role as a conference host, gobbling brightly colored eye-candy on the 
World Wide Web, exchanging real-time messages ("Hey, you wanna do lunch?") 
with real-life friends. The laptop lives on the bedside table, and I almost 
always fire it up for one last login before lights out.

There's something evolutionary about spending time in cyberspace. My monitor 
has morphed from a flat, impermeable surface into something with depth, like 
Alice's mirror in _Through the Looking Glass_. Behind that screen is an 
infinite dimension where all those people hang out, all that information 
resides. It may look like glowing phosphors, but it feels like real life to 
me.

I've evolved, too. My eyes have adjusted, somehow, to reading text as it 
scrolls up the screen. My neural wiring has expanded to encompass the 
extended group consciousness of the Internet, the instantaneous, almost 
telepathic communication that's only possible online. Early cyberlit talked 
about surgically installing docking points -- behind the ear, like an anti-
seasickness patch, is a favored spot -- for jacking in to The
Net. But a lot of fairly normal human beings have already adapted to life 
online, like the first amphibians, using nothing more than their computers 
and their imaginations. 

It's almost a new life form, part human and part machine. Going online 
enhances our perceptions, puts us in touch with the Hive Mind, lets us play 
tricks with time, space and identity. Whether this turns out to be a 
functional adaptation or an evolutionary dead-end remains to be seen. I'm 
betting on the former.

Like the man said, God help us.
-------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Living and Dying Online (c) August 1995, Reva Basch

Tom Mandel is dead. 

He was a feisty, cantankerous ASCII character, always opinionated and
often right. You either hated his blunt, knowledgeable, vaguely
patronizing style or you admired and were drawn to it. If you were
neutral on mandel -- his name looks a lot more natural in lower case,
the way it appeared above every message he posted -- it was because
you had never encountered him. Neutrality was rare, though, because
mandel was *everywhere*. 

mandel died a few months after starting discussion threads about his
lung cancer diagnosis on his main hangouts, the WELL and AOL. He
took his leave with amazing grace, courage and good humor. By the end,
he'd won over many of his online adversaries, including yours truly. His
passing was amply chronicled in his various online venues, and even in
real-world media like the _New York Times_. Clearly, mandel had had
what he sometimes suggested his fellow keyboard-punchers get -- A
Life.

This isn't going to be yet another mandel obituary. Really. He wasn't
the first Net-denizen to die -- in one virtual neighborhood alone, we've
lost casey, kj, tamar, raf, metaview, and a handful of others, their
passages less celebrated. As the baby-boomers who settled cyberspace
continue to age, the list will inevitably grow longer. mandel, a futurist
by profession, would be the first to tell you: Just look at the
demographics. 

Death, like birth and marriage and other rites of passage, makes online
life more real. We're at the very beginning of coming to grips with it,
evolving new rituals, keeping what seems to work and discarding what
doesn't. Social patterns are starting to emerge -- blank postings (which
mandel, by the way, despised) to indicate a moment of respectful
silence; "beams," sometimes ASCII-enhanced with angle-bracket arrows
and sprinklings of asterisk-stars, as expressions of hope and goodwill.

More permanent monuments are being erected, too, virtual plaques in
memory of the deceased. The WELL's Weird conference, an anything-
goes kind of place, commemorates a notorious mandel-ism -- sorry, but
I'm not gonna tell you; this *is* a G-rated magazine -- in its log-in
banner. A daily listing of new accounts is officially called the Blair
Newman Memorial Newuser Report, after metaview, who died five
years ago. There's a perennial topic about how crabby you're feeling,
renamed in honor of Casey, an exemplar of orneriness. She'd be tickled,
I'm sure of it -- though, of course, she'd never let us know.

An online death also brings out the same kind of bad behavior that you
see, now and then, at funerals and wakes. You've got the raucous and
inappropriate acting-out, the squabbling over the will, the self-
aggrandizement at the expense of the dearly departed -- who was,
naturally, *your* best friend, *your* worthiest opponent, the person
who taught *you* the most about... whatever. Sensitive souls avert their
eyes, or flame, or flounce off, offended. Others watch, fascinated, as
the grief-dynamic unfolds. If we've learned nothing else, we've learned
that everyone deals with bereavement in their own, sometimes bizarre
and quite possibly inappropriate, way. 

When a strong, prolific cyber-presence goes away, the silence is
deafening. What would mandel say? Isn't this about the point where
he'd jump into the argument? A thread's been ripped from the social
fabric, a tone subtracted from the mix. People are missed in proportion
to what they contributed; it takes a while for the survivors to
compensate, to re-calibrate the blend.

Living online guarantees a certain immortality. It's downright spooky
when you stumble across an old posting by someone who's long gone,
even more unsettling when the death is recent and the memories are still
fresh. A ghostly presence lingers; the eloquent observations, the well-
reasoned critiques, the silly jokes, the typos and misspellings are all
preserved in ASCII, like bugs in amber, for the ages. It's a biographer's
dream, I'd imagine -- gigabytes of primary text to study, thousands of
thought-trails leading from one discussion area to another. We show
different sides of ourselves, after all, when we're talking about politics
and parenting, movies and metaphysics, sex and science fiction. 

Marriages and births are easy; joyous occasions usually are. Dealing with
the hard stuff -- illness, aging, death -- is where we learn what online
community is really about. It's an opportunity for all of us to get better
at celebrating life, and the passage of life -- in both cyberspace and
what we laughingly call the *real* world.

'Bye, mandel. Kick some butt on the other side. I haven't joined your
new system yet, but one of these days, I will. 
--------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Building a Home on the Web (c) September 1995, Reva Basch 
 
Okay, I finally have a home page. It took me a while, especially 
considering that I'm what market researchers call an early adopter. My 
IBM XT had a serial number in the low 3000s. My first modem ran at 
300 baud. I was a budding nerd way before nerd-dom was cool. So I was 
getting kind of itchy about this home page thing. The technology had 
been out for months already, and some of my friends had pages up and 
were oh-so-casually giving out their URLs. It was time. 
 
Once I got moving, it didn't take long. My friend Eric came over for a 
couple of hours; we wrote some copy and some HTML code and got it 
ready to go. My page won't win any design awards; it's one of those 
family-scrapbook-crossed-with-business-card deals. There's a flattering 
picture of myself taken by my friend Tracy at David and Rita's 
wedding last year. There's some text about what I do for a living, and a 
cover shot of my book _Secrets of the Super Searchers_. Then there's a 
bit about my cats and my husband, which I figured would discourage 
those guys who troll for babes on the Net. I included Jerry's email 
address so I could link it to his home page if he ever gets around to 
putting one up. Bear with me; I'm including these details for a reason.  
 
The page went up on my local server, and the email began to arrive. 
"Nice page" comments from people I didn't know, on other systems, 
from the Netherlands and Japan. Longer communiques from wannabes 
who wanted to know how they too could surf the net (jeez, do I hate 
that phrase) for a living. Then the loony stuff started. One guy with an 
.edu address wrote that he'd clicked and clicked on the line about my 
cats but it never got him anywhere, and would I send him some GIFs of 
them anyway? I patiently explained that not everything on a web page is 
*alive*; sometimes, as Freud might say, a phrase is just a phrase. To tell 
you the truth, I was planning on linking in some shots of Abbie, Tigray 
and Flash, but now that I know there really *are* petophiles on the Net, 
I'm reconsidering. 
 
Then there was the mail my husband received. Addressed to his email 
account, with "Tracy Johnston" as the subject header, the message asked 
Tracy for more information about her book, _Secrets of the Super 
Searchers_. Now this fellow worked *hard*: He had to overlook the 
boldface "Reva's Home Page" header and the "mail to" link that would 
have let him email me without even keying in my address. He had to 
pick Tracy's name from the squinty little type I'd used for her photo 
credit, and he had to note Jerry's email address and make a special 
effort to mail him. As it happens, Tracy has written a book called 
_Shooting the Boh_, about her river-rafting travels in Borneo. Some 
devilish friends suggested sending a copy to my clueless correspondent. I 
wonder if he'd notice. 
 
So far, all this was kind of amusing. But pretty soon the junk email 
started sifting in. Each message started out "Nice home page!" and went 
on to talk about how, as a leading-edge technovisionary -- I did, after 
all, own a computer and know about the Web -- I should consider their 
portfolio of high-yield investments. Uh huh. 
 
There are programs, see, that sniff out new activity at Web sites, and 
maybe even flag new sites as they come onto the Net. I wasn't surprised. 
I knew going into this that they don't call it web *publishing* for 
nothing. The word "publish" is probably related to "public" and 
"publicity"; if it isn't, it should be. That's why corporations find the Web 
so alluring. 
 
The point is, if you decide to indulge in this kind of vanity publishing  
-- I, as a Leo and a shameless self-promoter, could not resist -- you're 
putting up a billboard on the information highway, an advertisement for 
yourself. People do read these things. They may treat your Web presence 
like fodder for a direct mail campaign, or an easy way to meet new 
penpals, or a legitimate means of connecting with people and things that 
truly interest them. One way or another, though, you're going to hear 
from them.  
 
Oh, all right: http://www.well.com/user/reva 
email: reva@well.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Return to Sender - Insufficient Cachet (c) October 1995, Reva 
Basch

On the Internet, the saying goes, nobody knows you're a dog.
Cyberspace is the great leveler, erasing the artificial distinctions of 
age, class, gender, physical condition and maybe even -- who knows? -
- species. All the Net sees is your burning intellect, transformed to
ASCII. Online, you're judged solely by the quality of what you have to
say. Finally, true democracy in action. 

Yeah, right. Do you really ignore the return addresses on your email?
Don't you do some mental redlining based on where people who post in
newsgroups are posting *from*? Face it, some net.addresses carry much
more cachet than others. Small systems like The WELL, Echo and The
River are the cyber-equivalent -- minus the money, natch -- of
Beverly Hills 90210. Mindvox, on the other hand, has the reputation of
being the biker bar of cyberspace. Popular services like AOL and
Prodigy, inhabited by a high proportion of kids and other net newbies,
have "suburbia" stamped all over them; the message they convey is mass
market, middle of the road. CompuServe is more established, if a bit
provincial, but those institutional-style numbers don't help at all --
76670,101 may be an acceptable name for one of those Net-cruising
robots, but it doesn't say much about *you*. An account on Netcom,
Delphi, PSI or one of the other big access providers signifies that you've
probably been hanging out online long enough to feel at home. 

The trailing portion of a typical Net address, the part that looks like a
DOS file extension, works as a bias filter, too. Depending on the
context, the .edu suffix that signifies a university or school account
could lend credibility to a discussion: "This guy's an academic; he must
know what he's talking about" -- or detract from it: "Just another dumb
undergraduate." A .gov or .mil address raises eyebrows when it pops up
in one of the racier alt. newsgroups; when I find one in my mailbox I
have to stifle the urge to salute. 

Non-profits generally use .org as a suffix, and .net is supposedly
reserved for network access providers (too bad; I've always wanted to
register hair.net as my very own domain). The fastest-growing category,
as more and more businesses establish their own territory on the Net, is
.com, to indicate a commercial site. To hear WELL users grumble when
their old-style, geographic address -- well.sf.ca.us -- gave way to the
corporate-sounding well.com, you'd think it stood for "commonplace." 

It's a lot easier to maintain multiple addresses in cyberspace than it is 
in real life. Some of us accumulate alternate email accounts like a
pocketful of loose change. You can find me on CompuServe, Netcom,
SlipNet and AOL, but my WELL address is embossed on my cyber-
identity like a street address on a sheet of expensive stationery; that's
where I want people to know I *live*. 

Many systems let you forward mail automatically to your "home"
account, but one enterprising outfit has come up with an even more
elegant solution to email schizophrenia -- a generic but permanent
online address. No matter how many accounts you have or how often
you move, your mailing address remains the same --
yourname@pobox.com. It's like having the same phone number follow
you around for the rest of your life. (mail info@pobox.com for details). 

Some net-heads reserve one address for business and routine
correspondence, another for their social life, and still another for
*serious* fun. Folks who play hot and heavy on the Net can post under
a pseudonym or launder their real-life identity through an anonymous
remailer. Identity on the Net is fluid by nature, and role-playing games
are cool -- as long as everyone else involved *knows* it's a game and is
playing by the same set of rules. 

But what if they don't? A few months ago, somebody put up a Web-
based utility called Fakemail that would let you send mail to anyone on
the Net -- that purported to be *from* anyone on the Net. Great fun,
huh? Maybe I'm just an uptight accountability-freak, but in my mind,
the potential for screwing up people's lives -- whether it's your "boss"
telling you that you're fired, or "Ed McMahon" informing you that
you've finally won the Publishers' Clearing House Sweepstakes -- far
outweighs the giggle factor of getting mail from, say,
elvis@graceland.com. Sure enough, the abuse factor surfaced almost
immediately, and the creator, to his credit, suspended Fakemail. (You
can check out what's left of it at www.netcreations.com/fakemail/). 

Maybe dogs can play on the Internet undetected. I find the idea kind of
appealing, actually. But if someone's playing God with my identity out
there, I'd sure want to know about it. Wouldn't you?
--------------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: The Net Strikes Back (c) November 1995, Reva Basch 

Half a dozen of these columns and I haven't talked about sex yet. Pretty
amazing, considering that the Internet is just littered with pornography,
pederasts and perverts of all descriptions. At least that's what some of
the major media would like you to believe, judging by the hysteria with
which they've been pumping the "Cyberporn" scare. One national news
magazine was suckered pretty badly. It devoted a cover story --
complete with sensational artwork of a freaked-out child, face
illuminated by the eerie glow of a computer monitor -- to a study called
_Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway_. The
study, supposedly done under the auspices of Carnegie Mellon
University, claimed among other things that 83.5% of the images
available on Usenet newsgroups were pornographic. The media spin
implied that kids had ready access to all this -- nay, that they couldn't
help stumbling over dirty pictures in their innocent exploration of the
Internet. The horror of it all.  
 
Guess what? The study turned out to be deeply flawed on every level, 
from premise to methodology to conclusions. The principal (and only) 
investigator, a 30-year-old grad student in electrical engineering, was 
revealed to have an agenda of his own. Eventually the magazine 
admitted, in its own face-saving way, that it had been taken. TV and 
radio networks, after picking up on the sensationalism of the original 
story, recanted. A Senate committee investigating pornography on the 
Internet had invited the researcher to testify; it withdrew the invitation. 

The debunking of the bogus report is a fascinating case study in 
collective investigative journalism, online-style. It played out in 
several venues, most notably the Media conference on The WELL and
the alt.internet.media-coverage newsgroup (The entire process is 
documented on the World Wide Web at
http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/cyberporn.debate.cgi).
Distinguished academics disputed the study's statistical underpinnings;
attorneys doggedly probed the gaping holes in its logic. Even habitues of
the alt.sex.binaries newsgroups pointed out that digital images of *any*
sort are relatively large, and frequently take up multiple files. The
survey hadn't accounted for this, or for the fact that a suggestive
caption like "Hot to Trot" -- did I mention that the report 
based its content analysis on descriptions, not on the pictures 
themselves? -- may well turn out to be a come-on for an innocuous
picture of a pony. Or a turkey.
 
But that's not all. Intentionally or not, the study had confused adult 
BBSes -- many of which are set up specifically to distribute sexually- 
explicit images -- with Usenet and the Internet at large. That's a fatal 
flaw: Unlike the Net, such BBSes won't let you play without a credit
card number. How many pre-adolescents are sufficiently motivated by
pictures of naked people to hack their parents' wallets? Not only that,
such BBSes are usually standalone systems, not part of the Internet at
all. The cyberporn study was thoroughly discredited.  
 
Porn on the Internet is not the issue. Nobody denies that it exists -- 
although not in the overinflated quantities claimed by the bogus report. 
The real story is that the Net struck back: Their freedom threatened and
their integrity under fire, a group of cyber-citizens seized the power of 
the medium itself to expose shoddy "research" and, in the process, try to
quell the fears of the not-yet-online. 
 
Whose business is it that there's pornography online? In my college
days, campus social life was ruled by a policy called _in loco parentis_,
the idea that, since your folks weren't around to keep an eye on you, the
university would play that role. Dress codes, curfews, and no-visitors- 
of-the-opposite-sex in your dorm room were all part of that
paternalistic regime.  
 
The U.S. Congress is not my mom and dad. I don't want the
government, or some "family values" group that never met *my* family,
to restrict my ramblings around the Net because they might lead me,
eventually, to the seamy side of town. I can deal with it -- after all, 
I'm not drawn inexorably into every adult bookstore I pass in real life. 
Besides, who decides where a lively, colorful neighborhood ends and the
red light district begins? 
 
As for the kids, that's where "parentis" comes in. Many commercial
online services allow parents and teachers to turn off access to
questionable sites. Software tools like SurfWatch
(http://www.surfwatch.com/surfwatch) let you use your discretion to
block them. Such solutions aren't perfect; they still raise troublesome
issues around what gets screened out and why. More than anything else,
parents need to instill in their kids a healthy, open and communicative
attitude about sex. We must never surrender our right to determine what
we, or our children, read and look at -- on or off the Net. 
 
--------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: The Malling of Cyberspace (c) December 1995, Reva Basch

Magazine deadlines being what they are, I'm sitting here in late August,
the week of the Windows 95 release, shaking my head at the image of
grown men and women lining up to buy software at 12:01 AM -- and
figuring that by December the hysteria will surely have died down.

I like to think of myself as immune to hype. When people behave like
lemmings, my instinct is to run the *other* way. But Microsoft managed
to program its way into my subconscious on this one: A couple of nights
ago, I must confess, I dreamed about Bill Gates. He was sitting in front
of a computer with half a dozen people around him, and he was saying,
rather defensively, "Well, it's *almost* as good as a Mac." 

As it happens, I already have a Mac. But I've got a fleet of PCs, too,
and I'll probably bow to the inevitable, jettison my old faithful
DesqView -- Quarterdeck's fine though unglamorous multi-tasking
environment -- and adopt 95 before the year is out. 

Unlike some of my friends, I don't think of Mr. Bill as the anti-Christ,
or of Microsoft as the Evil Empire. That multicolored Windows banner
does raise a red flag in my mind, though, when I see it waving over
cyberspace. By bundling Microsoft Network (MSN) with every copy of
its hot new operating system, those guys up in Redmond have made it
infinitely easier for the non-wired among us to find their way online.
Microsoft has the muscle to bring electronic information to the haves
and have-nots alike, while promoting the growth of a global online
community. It's like making easy-to-use, affordable telephone service
universally available, while at the same time paving the roads, building
the cities and stocking the library shelves for millions of new cyber-
citizens. 

What I fear is the malling of cyberspace. Compared with Microsoft,
AOL is one of the *little* guys. Just as AOL introduced hordes of
computer users to online services, MSN will be the gateway into the
Internet for hundreds of thousands more. Suburban kids today are
growing up without a clue that shopping wasn't always a shiny, climate-
controlled, brand-dominated experience, that there used to be mom-
and-pop stores, non-chain restaurants, funky boutiques and antique
shops to explore. The new generation of novice cybernauts is being
presented with a similar _fait accompli_: For them, going online means
clicking on the MSN icon; cyberspace is a brand-name product. 

The Net evolved from the bottom up, the result of a massive and
uncoordinated series of messy creative bursts: the thousands of single-
phone line, spare-bedroom BBSes that predated the information
superhypeway; the academics and researchers who first discovered what
the Internet was good for; the schoolkids constructing fantasy realms in
MUDs and MUSEs; the raucous habitues of the more outrageous
alt.newsgroups; the NCSA programmers who designed Mosaic and thus
defined the generation of graphical browsers by which we experience
the World Wide Web today; the pair of Stanford students who wrote a
powerful, easy-to-use Web search engine and named it Yahoo; the
hippies and pranksters who turned The WELL and similar systems into
the drug of the '90s for thousands of hardcore conversation-heads. 

Granted, Microsoft promises that we'll be able to access a diverse range
of features and services through MSN. But with Mr. Bill as landlord, I'm
not sanguine about the survival of some of the more edgy, controversial
and economically marginal neighborhoods. It's all too easy to buy up
real estate and bulldoze it to suit your specs, and to marginalize the
holdouts by declaring yourself to be the standard.

Early adopters of Windows 95 -- those guys who were lining up at
midnight in front of their neighborhood software dealers -- are
reporting that clicking on the MSN icon wipes out, without warning, the
settings for any other online providers you might be using. Ooops. How
embarrassing for a company that had finally persuaded the Justice
Department that it had no intention of monopolizing the online market.
Perhaps it was a programming error, or a lapse in judgement somewhere
in the product design cycle. Surely it's not a symbol of the "we know
what's best for you" arrogance that my more rabidly anti-Bill friends
are claiming. 

And yet there *is* a symbolism that's impossible to ignore. Microsoft is
not a value-neutral public utility; there's a lot more at stake here than a
dialtone or a live electrical outlet. Once you start delivering intellectual
content, and influencing the way people interact with each other, the
last thing on earth you want is a near-monopoly. Cyberspace doesn't
need Windows; it needs doors, and a lot more of them. 
---------------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: The Internet Frontlash (c) January 1996, Reva Basch

The Internet backlash has begun. It's a fundamental law of physics, one
of the few I remember from high school: For every action there is an
equal and opposite reaction. Cliff Stoll, hacker-hero of _The Cuckoo's
Egg_, has decided that it's more noble to grow tomatoes, raise kids and
ride your bike to the library than it is to discuss gardening or parenting,
or exchange research results, with people halfway around the world. His
newest book, _Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information
Highway_, is just one of several recent publications bemoaning the
dehumanizing effect of computers on our lives. Mark Slouka, who wrote
_War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the Hi-tech Assault on Reality_,
thinks we're in danger of abandoning the physical world for the virtual
one. In _The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic
Age_, Sven Birkerts -- who admits that he doesn't even own a PC --
argues that it's impossible to transmit "soul-data" online, that the printed
page is intrinsically more real, rounded and authentic than anything you
might read on a screen.

Sorry, guys; I don't buy it. My personal experience aside, the tangible
rewards of living in an electronic global village -- and the many ways
in which that experience maps, exactly, to the offline world -- have
been abundantly and convincingly documented. The first two chapters
of Howard Rheingold's _The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the
Electronic Frontier_ contain more wisdom and informed insight than
anything I've read on the subject by Birkerts, Slouka or Stoll. 

What all these Chicken Littles of cyberspace fail to acknowledge is that
online and so-called "real" life are not mutually exclusive. At their best,
the two worlds inform and enrich each other. I've picked up technical
tips from the alt.news.microsoft newsgroup that have saved me hours of
real-world frustration. Recipes from rec.food.veg.cooking have been
part of my dinner-party repertoire for years. I adopted two of my cats,
Flash and Tigray, after reading an electronic "Free Kitties" notice in
The WELL's Pets conference. Few things are more central to the quality
of life, or more real, than a cat dozing in your lap while you type on
your keyboard.

I'm lucky, I know, to live in an area where thousands of people believe
that hanging out online is a perfectly normal way to spend at least a
portion of their time. Physical proximity helps. Some of my closest
friends are people I first got to know as glowing phosphors. Online, I
learn what makes them tick, their passions, beliefs and prejudices.
Offline, we might continue the conversations we started on the Net, or
leapfrog over those and explore new territory instead. Back online
again, I carry the real-life emoticons from our face-to-face
encounters -- a smile, an aggrieved voice, an eyebrow raised in ironic
intent -- that help me broaden the bandwidth of bare ASCII text. 

A couple of recent events have underscored how intertwined my on-
and offline lives have become. My closest friend from high school
moved from New Jersey to a neighborhood five minutes away. I can
practically hear her... well, never mind. And my sweetie ended his
contract with corporate America and set up a home office two floors up
from my cave in the basement. One night I wanted to call Libbi but
thought it might be too late. I logged in and saw her online; she was still
awake. I sent her a real-time message telling her to log out so I could
call. One of these days she's going to have to get a second phone line. 

As for Jerry, it's important for both of us to maintain the illusion of
separate work spaces, not to mention a, ahem, professional attitude,
during the course of the day. As a result, we communicate more heavily
through email -- the quickest yet most non-intrusive medium we
know -- than when he worked downtown. Walk up two flights of stairs?
Not between 9 and 5.

Here's my Revelation of the Month: It's *okay* to spend time on the
Net. The keyword is *balance*. For a reasonably well-adjusted person,
the ability to move seamlessly between cyberspace and meat-space is a
sign of an integrated life. The lack of boundaries between the two
realms is healthy, not pathological. The Net can be an extension of
what's real and worthwhile, not a substitute for it. Anyone who claims
that the online world lacks soul and sensuality just hasn't been paying
attention -- or has never logged in. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a pot of pasta sauce on the stove to
tend to, a cat to un-install from my lap-top, and a couple of flights of
stairs to climb.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Web-Browsing: Beyond the Buttons (c) February 1996, Reva Basch

I need to get out more. I've fantasized about a screensaver that pops up
with messages like "Go for a walk," "Find a hobby," "Get a life."
Actually, my offline existence is pretty well-spent. But for those of us
whose working hours involve navigating the Internet in search of
information, an occasional face-to-face schmooze-fest helps to nudge us
out of our well-traveled ruts and remind us that there are some
alternate, and much more scenic, routes.

ONLINE '95 was one of those opportunities. Coming home from that
meeting, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. I'd just been handed a
heap of new toys and I could hardly wait to start playing with them. In
a field littered with Internet Expos and Virtual Extravaganzas,
ONLINE, Inc. is a pioneer; they've been sponsoring seminars and
exhibits since the information superhighway was a two-lane country
road, traveled by a sparse population of researchers and librarians.
Never distracted by the neon glare of the cyber-billboards that have
overtaken the Net -- and especially the World Wide Web -- the
ONLINE conference has focused steadily, for 18 years running, on
*content*: What's online that's really meaningful, useful, and reliable?

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone's asked me "But what's the
Internet *good* for?" Start with John Makulowich's Awesome Lists
(http://www.clark.net/pub/journalism/awesome.html), a collection of
prime examples. His Truly Awesome list points you to hyper-linked
resources like the All-in-One Search Page, an ambitious attempt to
cover everything from hacker's jargon to zip code lookups and beyond;
City.Net, a meta-link to information about cities worldwide; periodical
articles via UnCover and The Electronic Newstand; and master sites that
are, in turn, collections of pointers to Web-based game sites, global
weather reports, software libraries, and activities specifically designed
for kids. 

Awesome will also lead you to some power-searching tools you might
not have known existed -- comprehensive Web indexes and catalogs like
Open Text, the University of Michigan Subject Clearinghouse, and the
WWW Virtual Library; Liszt, which looks for mailing lists or email
discussion groups devoted to a particular subject and tells you how to
subscribe; Deja News, for running keyword searches in Usenet
newsgroup archives; and Stanford's Netnews Filtering Service, which
will alert you to recent newsgroup postings that might concern you
(wouldn't you want to know if they were talking about you in
alt.net.weirdos?); 

Then there are little gems like Win Treese's Internet Index. If you read
_Harper's_ magazine for its tongue-in-cheek statistical Index, you'll
probably get a similar kick from its cyber-cousin
(http://www.openmarket.com/diversions/internet-index), which
contains fascinating factoids -- all verifiable, but phrased and
juxtaposed to amuse -- like "At current growth rates, estimated time at
which everyone on Earth will be on the Internet: 2004." 

Vicki's Vast List of food and drink sites
(http://www.gulf.net/~vbraun/food.html) is pretty tasty, too. Ms.
Vicki's site includes not only the predictable pointers for chili-,
chocolate- and garlic-lovers (and for the official canned meat product
of the Net, the ubiquitous Spam Spam Spam), but also links to a
salmonella site (yum!) and one devoted to durian, the foulest-smelling
fruit in the world. 

No wonder this info-junkie left ONLINE '95 feeling high and happy, if
perhaps a little queasy from information overload (or maybe it was that
durian). My mind had been opened to a whole new set of possibilities
for finding information on the Net. The most obvious tactics -- firing
up a search engine like Lycos or WebCrawler, or drilling down through
subject categories in a net directory like Yahoo! -- are literally at your
fingertips; just click a button on your Web browser. But resources like
The Awesome List, and all the other products of human endeavor that I
discovered and got to play with at ONLINE, represent an entirely
different approach to collecting information. It's a time-honored
strategy that librarians and researchers have known and used for years:
Ask someone who knows. Link-laden home pages and lists of lists are
just the latest manifestation of the collaborative attitude that's
characterized the Internet since its earliest days -- the true enthusiast's
impulse to ferret out the best stuff and share, rather than horde, it. As
cyberspace grows more commercial, let's hope this spirit of "giving
something back to the Net" prevails. 
------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: We're All In This Together (c) March 1996, Reva Basch

Back before the world got Webbed, there was Dungeons &
Dragons, a text-based, role-playing fantasy game in which the
players created their own reality out of words alone. It was
simple, and yet so incredibly deep and compelling once you got
into it that some participants almost ~became~ the characters
they were playing. 

D&D gave rise to MUDs, Multi-User Dungeons (alternatively
known as Dimensions, Dialogs or Domains), miniature online
universes based on various scenarios and casts of characters.
MUDs made the news when an Australian university outlawed
them; student MUDders logged in around the clock were
hogging the school's computer resources. 

MUDs not only survived, but transmogrified into dozens of
different forms. Some follow the adventure game/role-playing
conventions of D&D -- choose your weapon, slay the monsters,
attain treasure and enlightenment. Others, sometimes called
TinyMUDs, are more casual; characters interact much as they
would face-to-face, schmoozing, philosophizing, kidding around.
MUDs tend to endure; over time, they develop collective
histories, in-jokes and personalities.

Life in the MUD is still evolving. New species have emerged --
MOOs, MUSEs, MUSHes and MUCKs, each label signifying a
set of features and assumptions that distinguish them from each
other, and from the basic, plain vanilla MUD from whence they
sprang. Classes and seminars, professional groups and
collaborative artists are meeting online in MUD-like domains
tailored to their needs and expectations.

MUDs -- no big surprise -- have started migrating to the Web.
[For a taste of the rich and bubbling stew that is MUD-life
today, check Too's Generic MUD WWW Resource Page at --
deep breath --
http://www.nrl.navy.mil/CCS/people/edmond/muds/]. Although
some dinos (MUD veterans) and purists disapprove of the trend,
the quest for more bandwidth seems inevitable. Some Web-
based MUDs still rely on the power of words to evoke alternate
realities, but others are blending text with graphics, sound,
animation and even VRML, Virtual Reality Modeling Language,
to create three-dimensional environments and the characters that
populate them. Where will this lead? Picture the Holodeck on
the Starship Enterprise; it's just like real life, only not necessarily
~yours~. 

It's getting harder to separate fact from cyber-fiction. Neal
Stephenson's _Snowcrash_ (recommended reading for all
potential cybernauts) depicts a not-too-distant future in which
citizens spend as much time jacked in to the "metaverse" -- a.k.a.
The Net -- as they do interacting in real life. They move
seamlessly between the two, carrying their agendas with them. In
the metaverse, people appear as avatars, characters that may be
extensions of their real selves, or whimsical or monstrous
figments of their imagination. A fuzzy, low-resolution, black-and-
white avatar indicates that the owner is logging in from a public
terminal; newbies, not technosavvy or hip enough to have a
customized avatar, show up in one of a half-dozen or so cheap-
looking, off-the-shelf Barbie-and-Ken guises.

The metaverse, in the form Stephenson conceived it, is
practically here. We've got the components: Virtual communities
are thriving all over the Net. Hundreds of people crowd into
AOL chat rooms and onto Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels
to talk to -- or at least type at -- each other. The Web offers us
multimedia and the ability to create and animate our own
graphical domains. What MUDs and their offspring bring to the
mix is a combination of ongoing community and real-time
interaction, plus a permanent space in which everyone can
participate at the same time.

Most of the time, life online feels sequential, not simultaneous.
The word for that is asynchronous; it's a feature, not a bug. On
a conferencing system like CompuServe or The WELL, you can
dip into the conversational flow at 3 AM or whenever it's
convenient for you. But there are times when you crave total
immersion, when you want to ~know~ there are other people
around. When Jerry Garcia died last summer, Grateful Dead
sites all over the Net swarmed with grieving Deadheads. We
knew we weren't alone, but we were phantoms to each other,
our presence as a community only apparent when the sheer
number of users logged in at once brought the server to its
knees. 

What MUDs do for cyberspace is pin down a little more firmly
the coordinates of both time and space. Though rooted in
fantasy and role-playing, MUDs, as they continue to evolve,
could become the model for what life on the Net will be like --
literally, a ~shared~ reality. 

I know I left that sword around here someplace.

-----------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Goes To Show You Don't Ever Know (c) April 1996, Reva Basch

I saw 2001 again recently. Stanley Kubrick's techno-hallucinogenic
_tour de future_ -- the classic acid-trip movie of my g-g-generation --
has held up surprisingly well in some respects, and embarrassingly
poorly  in others. Years ago, the Pan Am logo on the side of the sleek
lunar shuttle struck me as  wryly amusing -- no doubt the major
international airline would continue to carry us well into the 21st
century. Same thing with the bell-shaped logo on the video phone booth
-- mighty Ma Bell would certainly dominate communications into the
unforeseeable future. And of course there was HAL, the main character,
an omniscient mainframe whose logo looked an awful lot like Big
Blue's, and whose name, if you slipped it just a letter to the right,
spelled out... IBM.

The late '60s, when 2001 was first released, were politically and socially
cataclysmic -- the Vietnam war,  the assassinations of Martin Luther
King and Bobby Kennedy,  massive anti-war demonstrations,
Woodstock, Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon. Strange days,  indeed.
But the movie reflects the last rays of an earlier, more insular time.
There's not a character-of-color to be seen, and the only women on the
set are flight attendants, receptionists, a couple of token heads in
meeting rooms, and a trio of dour Russian scientists oozing Cold War
distrust. It was celebrated at the time as a visionary masterpiece, but
culturally, 2001 was as myopic as they come. 

What about that computer? Black liberation and the women's
movement weren't the only sweeping social changes that Kubrick and his
pals failed to anticipate; they spaced out on the personal computer
revolution as well. Mice, multimedia and windowed environments are as
scarce, in Kubrick's world, as ethnic minorities. The gently ironic product
placements -- Pan Am ruling the skies just as the Bell System ruled the
communication channels -- seem  blatantly anachronistic now, and so
does that big old powerful central computer. 2001 is strictly a
mainframe world, with big, square, brightly colored buttons on huge
consoles, and dozens of separate video screens, each one flashing a
crude display -- the special effects crew saved the graphical fireworks
for the film's psychedelic finale -- wallpapering every available surface.

Personality-wise, HAL does anticipate the cranky, passive-aggressive
obstinacy of Windows 95. But in this movie, he -- the computer is a
guy-thing, too, of course -- is the embodiment of technology as the
foreign, dimly understood and vaguely threatening force it was for most
people in 1968. Try to imagine a remake with Apple logos, AOL chat
rooms,  and Microsoft's dweeby Bob playing HAL. It just wouldn't
work, not when you're trying to depict a computer as something as
scary, authoritarian and monolithic as the former Soviet Bloc. 

Speaking of monoliths,  the _deus ex machina_, the driving plot device 
-- just in case you haven't seen the movie or have mislaid a few brain
cells in the intervening years -- is a smooth-sided slab proportioned
approximately like the United Nations building, only smaller, that
mysteriously appears every few millennia or whenever mankind needs a
jab in its evolutionary backside. The monolith is consciousness-raising in
a box, leading apes to discover tools and, eons later, humans to explore
Jupiter and beyond. Apart from the light show and the French Provincial
time-warp right at the end, the monolith was the trippiest part of the
movie for me and the stoner crowd I hung out with. It represented the
intercession of the unknown, a slip in the continuum.

The deeper I get  into cyberspace, as both participant and observer, the
more I think about that monolith. We can speculate endlessly about the
future of the Net, the pros and cons of  life online, whether Microsoft's
vision, or Netscape's, will prevail. The trouble is, we're all prisoners of
our own perspective, every bit as much as Stanley Kubrick was when he
assumed that the Pan Am logo would carry the same meaning in the
year 2001 -- and in 1996, for that matter --  that it did in 1968. The
Mosaic browser was a mini-monolith of sorts, suddenly and
unpredictably changing the nature and direction of the Net. There will
be others; you can bet on it. 

The first time I saw the movie, I walked out of the theater murmuring
"Far out, man..." This time, I left shaking my head and thinking about
the futility of extrapolation. 2001 is  a  lesson in humility for any of us
engaged in predicting the future -- or planning to live there. 

-----------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Web Dreams (c) May 1996, Reva Basch

My high school French teacher used to say that you hadn't really
mastered a language until you found yourself dreaming in it. I never did
get to that point with French. But I must be as fluent in ASCII as a
native speaker, because I've been dreaming in it for years. Not every
night, of course, but sometimes, as I sleep, screensful of conversations
scroll upward on the inside of my eyelids. My dream landscape frequently 
takes on the same wavy, pulsating quality as my PowerBook display. 
Friends and colleagues who've clocked high mileage in cyberspace 
report similar experiences: A writer dreamed an entire
epistolary romance, complete with email headers. An artist turned
home-page designer admitted that most of his dreams are staged on
Web sites now, and are scripted in HTML. It makes sense to me; after a
day spent immersed in the online world, why wouldn't your
subconscious act out in a similar-seeming environment? 

The incursion of cyberspace into our psyches is partly a reflection of
how pervasive this online thing is becoming: AOL and Prodigy are both
running TV ads, just like the phone company. Howard Rheingold, a
regular guy with a colorful wardrobe who nailed the "virtual
community" phenomenon several years ago, is appearing nationwide in
a commercial for Kinko's copy shops. URLs are popping up in print
advertisements, too, not just in computer magazines, but in traditional,
upscale publications like _The New Yorker_. Driving in Berkeley the
other day, I saw a billboard consisting, in its entirety, of the URL for a
major bank. Stopping for gas, I noticed the fine print on the cardboard
sign at the self-service pump -- another URL. Okay, this is California,
and we may be slightly ahead of the curve, technology-wise. But it feels
like a science fiction movie -- The Invasion of the URLs -- where people
are starting to find these mysterious pods nestled among their tomato
plants, and it's clear that everything's begun to change. 

Web-site jokes are appearing in the Sunday comics, and there was that
rash, last summer, of stupid movies about the Net. The nerds who
invented the Yahoo! search engine were profiled in _People_ magazine.
A lot of this exposure can be chalked up to sheer hype, the media
feeding-frenzy that always surrounds the Next Big Thing. But the world
*is* changing: Major newspapers, though they still don't really *get* it,
no longer require reporters to define the Internet  -- "the huge,
interconnected global network of computers..." -- every time it's
mentioned in a story. My sister-in-law just sent me some photos of my
adorable nephew -- as .bmp files, uuencoded, in email. Granted, she's an
analytical chemist and no stranger to formatted data transfers, but there
are plenty of regular folks sharing their family albums online, too. Stand
back -- grandma's got a scanner and she knows how to use it!

But there's something else at work, too. Paul Saffo of the Institute for
the Future is one of the sharpest thinkers I know on technology and its
effect on our lives. He likens the current state of the Web to the dawn of
the Age of Plastic. This newly engineered wonder-material was a
novelty when it first appeared. People were intrigued, but uncertain
about how to use it. To overcome consumer reluctance, manufacturers
made it resemble more familiar materials -- tortoise-shell, ivory,
woodgrain. Plastic didn't really come into its own until the marketplace
had accepted it for what it was, and began to explore and exploit its
unique, plasticine properties. 

If _The Graduate_ were this year's movie instead of the hit of 1967 (I
know, fellow baby-boomers, it's hard to believe, but the _World
Almanac_ doesn't lie) the magic word would probably have been
"Internet," not "plastics." Saffo goes on to make the analogy explicit,
saying that we won't discover the full potential of the Web until we get
beyond the "electronic magazine" model, the make-it-look-like-something
-familiar stage. We're still in the tortoise-shell period of our
relationship with the Net. We haven't fully assimilated our 
cyber-experiences, or begun to internalize what it means to live and work
online. No wonder our collective unconscious is chugging away, trying
on different costumes, tossing out suggestions in dreamtime, attempting
to make sense of it all. Psycho killer app, qu'est-ce c'est?
--------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Be Careful What You Wish For (c) June 1996, Reva Basch

I've been in touch with my inner librarian. She's been wearing one of
those smug "I Told You So" expressions. Each time we touch base
these days, she reminds me of how she and her colleagues in the
database searching business had predicted the World Wide Web. 

What happened was this: Several years ago, when I was a full-time
freelance information professional -- have modem, will travel -- a group
of librarians and independent researchers got together to hammer out a
"user wish list" for the online industry. Along with the academic and
government users whofirst colonized cyberspace, we were the only
people interested in what was then called "computerized information
retrieval." Though we knew how to tap into vast electronic libraries and
had some powerful tools for doing so, we could see plenty of room for
improvement in our research environment. 

Our wish list -- widely circulated in the information industry at the time
-- called for standardized, easy-to-use interfaces; virtual documents that
preserved the layout and graphics of the printed page; imbedded
hypertext links to jump between related documents; and universal,
round-the-clock availability. 

Eventually the Web appeared, and our wishes were granted. Of course,
neither this lapsed librarian nor her inner self had anticipated that, in our
new online realm, Bianca's Smut Shack would be fighting it out for
bandwidth and attention with Fortune 500 corporate Web sites and
family-album home pages. We didn't foresee the anarchy and
cacophony, the hype, the *zoo* that would constitute the Web in 1996.
But we had, it turns out, sketched the functional specs for the new
model of information distribution that's taken the digital world by
storm.

Now, it seems like everybody who has something to sell is staking out
turf on the World Wide Web. Prodigy has blurred the lines between
proprietary content and the larger Web by integrating many of its special
interest areas with matching Web sites. CompuServe is taking a similar
approach with its new WOW! service, as well as offering Internet-only
access via SpryNet. AOL has acquired Web-expertise through its
purchase of pioneering Internet businesses like WAIS, WebCrawler, and
Global Network Navigator. Meanwhile, Microsoft appears to have
backed off on its plans for world domination through MSN; according
to recent pronouncements by Chairman Bill, he's decided to become
King of the Internet instead. At presstime, Apple was rumored to be
abandoning its ghost town, eWorld, and casting its lot with the hordes
on the Web. And, just to keep the pot boiling, AT&T has entered the
fray, announcing with its new WorldNet service that it intends to
become a flat-rate Internet access provider. When it comes to
communications, pure and simple, who's better positioned to turn the
Internet into a public utility than the heir apparent to Ma Bell herself?
Well, MCI and Sprint think they have a shot, too. 

At this stage of Webmania, the big losers seem to be, ironically, the
professional research services -- those trail-blazing, content-rich
database collections like Dialog and Lexis/Nexis that got me hooked on
the Net in the first place. Sure, they've all put up the obligatory home
pages, but they haven't Become One with the Web. They still don't
understand that the online world has done an end-run around them,
or maybe they're in denial. They keep pouring giga-bucks into 
developing proprietary, stand-alone search software, protecting their 
own little fiefdoms, while a steady stream of what used to be their 
exclusive product -- solid, reliable information on everything from 
aerospace to zoology -- is seeping out onto the Web. The word for 
this is *disintermediation.* Translation: Forget about the middle-man; 
take your wares to the Web yourself, and market them directly to the 
ultimate consumers.

This mass migration is fascinating to watch, but it makes me a little
uneasy. Sure, the Web is cheap, fun and easy to use, but it's really not 
a very good medium for online research -- at least, not *yet*. It's noisy,
chaotic and congested. Under such conditions, bad information tends to
drive out good. Even the best Web search engines are like a dull ax
compared to the surgical precision you get -- and pay for -- on the
professional database services. I'd hate to see the pioneers of the online
industry, who added so much value and who *still* might have a role to
play -- vanish without a trace. But it sure looks to me  like the ship has 
sailed without them. 
---------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Remote Control (c) July 1996, Reva Basch

Subhead: It may not look any different from where you're sitting, but
the cybernaut's going through a change of lifestyle. 

Something tells me I'm not in Berkeley anymore. There are deer and
jackrabbits outside my window, hawks cast fleeting shadows on my
monitor as they swoop low across the meadow, and I can see, smell and
hear the ocean, just beyond the trees. Also, there's no place within miles
to get a caffe latte. 

To make a long story short, we've moved to the country. We'd been
thinking about it for a while, but once the wheels started turning, it
happened breathtakingly fast. On the first day of spring, we caravanned
north, Jerry in the lead, me following with three vociferously unhappy
cats, and the moving van, several hours behind us, bringing up the rear. 

We had a surprise in store. While waiting for the truck, I wandered
down to the tiny post office to see if there was mail in our box yet.
"You're here!" said the postmistress the moment I walked in. "The
postcard lady is here!" Dozens of friends on The WELL, it turned out,
had conspired to deluge us with postcards -- wonderful, weird, funky,
off-the-wall, individualistic postcards, with messages to match. Jerry
and I sat on the floor of our unfurnished living room, awestruck,
touched. Even before the phone lines were strung, we'd reconnected
with the Net. 

I'd found a local access provider -- a key factor in being able to go rural
at all -- and arranged for an account even before we moved. What I
*hadn't* anticipated was that, along with the physical relocation, my
entire virtual environment would change as well. In my old Unix-based
shell account, I typed "mail" to read email, and "telnet" to log in to a
remote computer. I had a separate high-bandwidth account for firing up
Netscape and browsing the Web. Suddenly, I was grappling with the
new reality of a default PPP connection with a constellation of client
software orbiting around it -- one icon for email, another for remote
logins, still another for surfing the Net. In a single afternoon, I learned
to love Eudora. 

Telnet was a different story. Telnet is my social lifeline. It's the digital
avenue to my favorite online playgrounds. Whoever first observed that
things move more slowly in the country probably didn't have data
communications in mind, but my telnet connection, to put it bluntly,
sucked. It was tolerable in the early morning and late at night, but
during business hours it was monstrously slow. I calculated the costs of
dialing long-distance to the nearest network node, and wondered if I
could tilt my entire existence to take advantage of late-night calling
rates. I contemplated ending it all, or at least moving back to the city. I
even considered the possibility that this might be the universe's way of
telling me to spend my working hours, well, working. But the problem
was transitory -- I'd hit a patch of rough Net weather, and my fellow
navigators were struggling with it, too. Eventually, the lag subsided.
What a relief. Now I could think about where to put the sofa. 

Although the torrent of postcards has slowed to a trickle, picking up
mail at the post office is still enough of a novelty to be amusing. But it's
summer; I wonder what it'll be like when the winter rains close down
Highway 1 and the mail truck can't get through. Email may turn out to
be more reliable as well as more convenient -- assuming, of course, that
the power doesn't go out. Do they make propane hookups for
computers?

A Net-friend who lives in the serious boondocks coined the phrase
"beyond the node barrier" to describe life without a local dial-up
connection. I'm there now, too, on the far side of cheap and easy access
to the dozens of commercial online services that still don't let you
connect through the Net. But I'm not beyond the *nerd* barrier. These
hills are alive with the sound of modems. I've discovered an emigrant
population of smart and resourceful connectivity-hounds, exiles from
Main Street, geeks like me. Cyberspace means never having to say
"goodbye" to your virtual community-of-origin. It also means, I've
begun to realize, unbounded opportunities to discover new ones.

I've found a place to get a decent caffe latte, too.
--------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Revenge of the English Majors (c) August 1996, Reva Basch

The language is in motion, have you noticed? Whenever I write about the
Net, it's like riding a unicycle on a highwire, juggling five flaming torches
as I lurch desperately to keep my balance, and trying to remember which
way I fell the *last* time. Is it Gopher or gopher, FTP or ftp, online or on-
line, e-mail or email? Is it Caps or no caps or InterCaps, hyphens or run-
ons? And why is "run-on" spelled with a hyphen, anyway? These are things that 
keep writers and editors awake at night. Writers, anyway. Some writers.

Everyone's got a rationale, of course, for their way of doing things. UNIX
(or maybe Unix) users point out that every shift-key tells a story. UNIX is
case-sensitive, and common sense dictates that you print a UNIX command
the way you'd type it. FTP -- which stands for file transfer protocol, the
way you snarf information from someone else's computer to your own --
may look better on the page in upper-case, but it won't cut it, command-wise. 
Yet "ftp" at the beginning of a sentence looks weird. ftp this, mama!
See? Snarf, btw, is *not* a UNIX command. 

John Gage, chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, said that you can tell
something new is coming when the language surrounding it is ugly.
Novelty is a condition of life today, and we've got the awkward, kludged-
together language to prove it. An editorial note in my local weekly took up
more space than the URL it was attempting to explain: "The slashes and
internal periods are part of the World Wide Web address. The hyphen in
the middle and the period at the end are not."  

My personal crusade is hyphens. Hyphens have their place. A word like
tele-research would be incomprehensible without one. Some adjectives,
like "case-sensitive" up there, call out for hyphenation. But "e-mail" and 
"on-line" strike me as vestiges of an earlier time, when the concepts were
new and the terminology clearly borrowed from other, more familiar, parts
of our lives. Language smoothes down over time, like a river rock or a
well-worn shoe. Words eventually stop calling attention to themselves.
They lose their self-conscious caps and internal punctuation. When you
start seeing back-formations like "snailmail" and "offline," explicit new
descriptors for what used to be the default, it's time to de-hyphenate the
terms that inspired them. 

Kimberly-Clark and the Xerox Corporation have been fighting the leveling
effect for years. Their legal departments would prefer us to say, "Have a
Kleenex (tm) brand facial tissue" and "Would you bring me some coffee on
your way back from the Xerox (tm) brand photocopy machine?" Good
luck. I haven't seen anything from the attorneys for Federal Express yet,
but their own FedEx trademark seems to be losing its caps and verbing
itself -- "Would you mind fedexing this?" --  into modern American usage.
It's happening absolutely, positively overnight. 

For the corporate lawyers, the issue is one of brand identity and market
share. They're not consoled by the fact that when successful consumer
products lose their caps and (tm) signs and fade into the language, it's a
sign of widespread acceptance. It's happening, right now, with the Web.
First it was the World Wide Web, spelled out. Then WWW became the hip
abbrevation. For the blink of an eye, W3 was tres cool. Now, the only
place you see the sign of the triple W is in URLs -- www.zd.com -- and
even that's beginning to change. Before the end of the year, the web will be
well on its way to generic, lower-case status. That's what happens when
words assimilate.

Every living language changes as it comes in contact with other cultures.
What we're seeing now -- the mannered hyphenations, the uncertainty
about caps, the inconsistency that drives both writers and editors nuts -- is
our native tongue's effort to surf the cultural tsunami that followed the
computer revolution. English is a product of successive waves, over
centuries, of immigration, conquest and adaptation -- the Romans, the
Vikings, the Normans, the Nerds.
----------------------------------------
     
The Cybernaut: Casting a Wide Net (c) September 1996, Reva Basch

There is no privacy in obscurity anymore. The tangled skein of loopy 
interconnections that once made the Net an unfathomably complex and 
mysterious place is rapidly unraveling. No longer can the shadowy habitues of 
the alt.sex.fantasies.barney newsgroups rest secure in the knowledge that 
their lascivious thoughts about large purple dinosaurs will be shared solely 
by the four or five other trusted cyber-souls who are similarly obsessed. 
Thanks to powerful new search tools like DejaNews (http://www.dejanews.com), 
anyone with a Web browser can extract everything you' ve said, on any 
subject, in any newsgroup, no matter how underpopulated or esoteric. Talk 
about getting a complete picture -- maybe TOO complete -- of what makes a 
person tick. 

When Alta Vista (http://altavista.digital.com) -- the deepest, most 
comprehensive search engine yet -- was first released, it swept through the 
virtual realm like wildfire. The first thing everybody did, of course, was 
run a search on their own names. Reactions ranged from amusement and 
amazement to shock and dismay, as fragments of our personalities, intellects 
and predilections were captured in Alta Vista's vast, billowing and extremely 
fine net, carried to the surface, and exposed to the light of day. For those 
who thought they'd been floating gently through cyberspace, leaving barely a
ripple in their wake, Alta Vista was a revelation: There's evidence of our 
existence everywhere. We're snared by hyperlinks, hooked into digital 
realities that we'd never known existed. My pal Jon, a local newspaper 
columnist, discovered links to his column, via his paper's Web site, from 
halfway around the world. That explained the fan mail from outside his 
circulation area -- like Norway. Thanks to the Web, as he put it, "I'm 
syndicated without being syndicated."

It doesn't take much to become a public figure on the Net. You don't even 
have to own a computer. Web-based white-page services like Switchboard
(http://www.switchboard.com), Four11 (http://www.four11.com) or Yahoo's 
People
Finder (http://www.yahoo.com/search/people) will turn up individuals as 
resolutely unwired as my Mom. Whether the contact info they give you is 
*accurate* is another story. My own listing showed an out-of-date phone 
number, a city where I haven't lived in a dozen years, and a zip code I never 
claimed as my own. It's a mixed blessing, I suppose.

Digital directory assistance raises some pesky privacy issues. On the plus 
side, there's the reunite-with-old-friends-or-people-who-want-to-fling-money-
at-you factor. On the other, it makes us much more accessible to people by 
whom we might prefer not to be found -- telemarketers and email spammers 
being among the most benign examples. But is easy access the same as invasion 
of privacy? Psychologically, it may feel like it, but I'm not at all sure 
that it is. The Web scales everything up; it's just broadcasting your home 
town telephone book to the universe at large. Accessibility is a continuum; 
where do you draw the line between what's acceptable and what's not?

Try this as a basic operating assumption: There are no secrets online. If 
you've got a listed phone number, you have to recognize that, unless you take 
steps to de-list it, it's available, right now, to several million people. If 
you post in a newsgroup, no matter how obscure, or publish something on a Web 
site for the delectation of your friends, remember that the whole world *is* 
watching, or might be. That includes your parents -- or your kids, for that 
matter -- your business competitors, your current and potential employers, 
not to mention various self-appointed minions of the Decency Police.

Paranoid? Moi? I don't think so. The inescapable truth is that cyberspace is 
a lot bigger than it sometimes seems, and it's growing larger all the time. I 
wince when I see enthusiastic newbies who don't yet realize the size of the 
audience they're playing to, posting their intimate true confessions in some 
public forum on the Net. I love the varied and often outrageous voices that 
make the virtual realm such a fascinating place to live. I want that edginess 
and diversity to continue and to thrive. But the old rule of thumb applies: 
Never say anything online that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of 
the New York Times. 
--------------------------------

The Cybernaut: The Mental Picture (c) October 1996, Reva Basch

My high school has a home page now. There's a photo of the building itself, 
set against a pink-textured background that's vaguely reminiscent of the 
marble hallway, dominated by a huge headless statue of the Winged Victory, 
where we used to congregate between classes. There are portraits of the 
principals and of this year's star graduates. There are descriptions of the 
clubs, the annual events, the curriculum. It's a student-built Web site, and 
they did a solid, methodical job. I'm happy to see that my alma mater, which 
to my 17-year-old-eyes was unhealthily obsessed with tradition, has a 
foothold in the technological present as well.

But a home page isn't the same as a home room. Where are the classmates I 
shared first period with for four years? Where's the organic chem lab where 
we synthesized weird banana-citrus smells, and where I happened to be when I 
heard that JFK had been shot in Dallas? I can't find a hotlink, either, to 
Linton's coffee shop, a block north on Broad Street, where the black-clad lit
mag editorial crew staked out their turf, smoking cigarettes, volleying puns, 
trying on hip and disdainful attitudes, playing at being writers, artists, 
adults. 

What do you see when you sit in front of your computer -- a sheet of paper, a 
window, or a doorway into another world? Is it all two-dimensional, from 
spreadsheet to games to the virtual ant farm of your favorite online forum? 
Or do you find yourself looking *into*, not just *at* the screen, as if you 
were sitting in a theater, admiring the illusions created by props and 
lighting, involved with the characters for the length of the play, but never 
really entering their world? Or does the glass seem to melt away as you 
immerse yourself in a three-dimensional environment, entering sprawling 
structures with a maze of rooms and hallways, checking out public squares and 
private parties, exploring neighborhoods that are nearby and familiar, and 
others that are exotic and far-away?

Of course it depends on the application -- I'm not often inspired to set out 
on joyful romps through my database management software. There's a reason, 
though, why the desktop metaphor has caught on for Macs and PCs alike, and 
why most people would rather point and click than type a string of commands. 
Humans need spatial cues, mental maps of the territory. That's especially 
true when we go online, where the terrain is vast and uneven, the boundaries 
poorly marked, the local ordinances undocumented, and the natives sometimes a 
bit... peculiar. We talk about going "over" to AOL or drilling "down" through 
links at a Web site. I trudge uphill periodically to one forum I'm obligated 
to visit for business, but my favorite playgrounds are a brisk, wind-in-my-
hair, cyber-cycle ride away. 

I can't make sense of an online environment until I've visualized it in 3-D 
and furnished it in my mind. I know there's technology like VRML that will 
actually do this for me, but I'd rather leave something to my imagination. In 
one virtual venue, we sit around schmoozing on ratty but comfortable old 
sofas, munching cookies and drinking tea. Another gathering place is a bright 
room where the conversation is scintillating but nobody dares to sit on the 
expensive designer chairs. Some are tiny, intimate spots where a few good 
friends trade  confidences, while others are performance spaces, as vast and 
daunting as Madison Square Garden. Each of my online hangouts has a different 
feel, depending on who's around, their moods and 'tudes, and the general 
conversational drift. Come to think of it, quite a few of the places I go 
remind me a lot of high school. Maybe my alma mater's home page is just fine 
the way it is.
----------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Rapture of the Net (c) November 1996, Reva Basch

My friend Hank is approaching retirement age. He's ready to do it, his wife 
wants him to do it, and they have the financial security to do it. He doesn't 
have many hobbies, though, other than fast cars, bicycle racing, good dining 
and fine wine, each of which carries some built-in limitations if pursued to 
excess. But he's a Type-A, workaholic kind of guy, and he's looking for a 
consuming passion -- something to fill the long, empty hours he foresees 
stretching out ahead of him once the Social Security checks start rolling in. 

So I introduced him to the Web. We sat down at my computer one morning and 
began by checking out the hot Italian models at www.vol.it/FERRARI/. Then we 
zoomed over to the Tour de France (www2.letour.fr/) and monitored near-real-
time results from the race in progress. From there, we pedaled to www.le-
sommelier.fr to check the prices on some of the great Bordeaux. Gulp. Perhaps 
a more modest domestic vintage instead? We hopped the Atlantic and browsed 
the wine list at the Virtual Vineyard (www.virtualvin.com). After a lot more 
site-seeing, we headed for the recipes and restaurant reviews at 
www.epicurious.com. 

No wonder we'd gravitated toward the food pages. By the time we shook 
ourselves out of our mutual trance, it was almost dinnertime. Hank, glazed, 
boggled and mildly intoxicated from his day-long Tour de Net, had his first 
glimmerings of what life after retirement might be like. And once more, I'd 
watched a neophyte computerist succumb to what divers call the "rapture of 
the deep." Enthralled by your surroundings, a new universe unfolding in all 
directions, you lose track of time and the outside world. 

Athletes feel something similar during peak performance. So do actors and 
musicians, painters and computer programmers. It's called "flow," a fugue 
state, almost a trance, where you become utterly involved with your 
environment, whether it be the ocean, the effort, or the machine. You're in 
flow when you're totally immersed in a good book, or caught up in a movie, 
where the intrusion of the "real" world comes as a shock. The concept was 
promulgated by psychologist Mihaly "Spellcheck THIS" Csikszentmihaly in a 
book called _Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience_. Inevitably, the Web 
marketeers have begun to move in, investigating whether "flow" can be 
exploited to make consumers more susceptible to sales pitches, or whether, on 
the contrary, the experience of Web-surfing is so riveting in its own right 
that unwanted messages are unconsciously blocked. 

The fantastically ingenious playwright Tom Stoppard once characterized his 
communication style as "free association within an infinite regression of 
parentheses." He was describing the same kind of intuitive, endlessly-
interconnected structure that gave the Web its name. The Web's hyperlinks
mirror the creative leaps made by the human mind at play. Web-surfing puts us 
back in touch with the way we explored the world when we were kids, before 
books and school curricula channeled our thought processes into orderly, and 
often arbitrary, sequences with definite beginnings and endings.

The Web wears its neural synapses on the outside. It turns our brains inside-
out as well, giving ordinary mortals a chance to experience the altered mind-
state where artists and virtuosos do their best work. "Flow" is what keeps us 
pointing and clicking long after we've found, or forgotten, what we went 
online for in the first place. "Flow" is like an endorphin high; it goes a 
long way toward explaining the addictive appeal of the Web. I suspect that my 
friend the cyclist race-car buff oenophile gourmet is on the threshold of a 
new obsession that might last him the rest of his life. Welcome to 
retirement, Hank. Don't worry about it; just go with the flow. 
---------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Rear Window (c) December 1996, Reva Basch

I like to think of myself as a student of human nature, but the people at 
Magellan have got me pegged. I'm actually a voyeur. In what I'm sure was a 
traffic-building tactic for their Internet Guide site -- it sure hooked me in 
-- they've put up one of the most dramatic and fascinating demos I've ever 
seen on the Web. It's not a multimedia extravaganza; there's isn't a 
RealAudio sound file, QuickTime video, or jazzy Java animation in sight. But 
I can watch it, transfixed, for hours at a time. 

It's called Search Voyeur. If you browse your way to 
voyeur.mckinley.com/voyeur.cgi, you, too, can witness a constantly-changing 
array of what Magellan calls "randomly-selected real-time searches." The 
display updates automatically every 20 seconds, or when you click the Reload 
button on your Web browser. It's a rolling glimpse into the collective psyche 
of the Net, a parade of mass culture icons, private fetishes, the esoteric 
and the mundane. You see search queries exactly as they were entered, typos 
and all: "terminal velosity," "jurasic park," "texas department of heatlh." 
You get a sense of the global reach of the Web: "helsinki lippupalvelu," 
"schwule freundschaft," "universidad politecnica puerto rico." You learn what 
people mean when they tell you they're doing research on the Web: "how the 
deceased communicate to the living," "prices for honda accord in atlanta, 
ga," "liverpool football club," "coffee." You get the predictable -- "Pamela 
Anderson," "Pearl Jam," and the ever-popular "stuff" -- and the un- -- "http 
expasy hcuge ch sprot sprot top," "toenail fetish," "margarine history."

Aside from the Search Voyeur, Magellan's main claim to fame is that it 
reviews sites and rates them on a 4-star scale. The Magellan search engine 
gives you the option of searching the entire net, or just those sites with 
the Magellan seal of approval. Similarly, Point (www.pointcom.com) lets you 
focus your search on its "top 5%" of the Web. Instead of driving myself crazy 
because I might be missing something, I'm starting to appreciate not only the 
selectivity of rating services, but the personalized filtering offered by 
sites like My Yahoo! (edit.my.yahoo.com/config/login), a build-it-yourself 
approach to the Web. There are customized Web clipping services like NewsPage 
(www.newspage.com), too, and intelligent agents like Firefly 
(www.firefly.com) that learn your tastes and not only cater to them, but hook 
you up with a community of like-minded Netheads. 

Savvy users now realize that they don't have to deal with the entire Web -- 
just those parts of it that interest them, or that some trusted third party 
has told them are worthwhile. Smart developers know that one-size-fits-all 
search engines are reaching the end of their useful lives. Designing for the 
lowest common denominator  -- a system that works for everybody, sort of -- 
seldom produces excellent results. 

The age of Web specialization has begun. We're going to see search tools 
optimally tuned for music lovers, and others geared for mechanical engineers. 
When a marine biologist starts his search engine, it's going to be a 
different chunk of software than what a trivia lover or baseball fan fires 
up. Why? Each field of interest has its own vocabulary, its own shared 
assumptions, its own network of affiliations and related ideas. The search 
aids that work best are the ones smart enough to know, or to learn and 
internalize, how their users think. 

Librarians and my colleagues in the research-for-hire business love to talk 
about the weird things people ask for. They don't know the half of it. 
Magellan's Search Voyeur brings to the surface not just the routine business, 
hobbyist and bar-bet inquiries, but the whole random, furtive and perverse 
spectrum of human curiosity. I'm not quite sure how I'd feel if my probing 
questions about -- let's just say -- inter-species communication or Antonio 
Banderas -- were brought, however anonymously, to the attention of anyone who 
might be watching. But what fertile ground for the designers of the next 
generation of Web search tools: a living, breathing cross-section of what's
really on everybody's mind. 
----------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: We Live to Listserve (c) January 1997, Reva Basch

I've been living in the country for six months now, and I've gotten to know 
some of my neighbors pretty well. There's a pleasant, soft-spoken guy who 
makes bad puns at every opportunity, and a prickly old curmudgeon who sees 
conspiracy everywhere and reduces each issue to us-versus-them. There's an 
earnest and good-hearted woman who's obsessed with environmental causes, and 
an octogenarian who tells spellbinding stories about what the place was like 
thirty years ago -- illuminating, in the process, why things are the way they 
are now. As in every community, there are folks I look forward to running 
into, and others I try to avoid. Sometimes we wave when we pass each other on 
the highway, or say "hi" and schmooze for a while if we happen to meet at the 
store. But mostly, we get together online. 

That's right. This tiny settlement is *wired*. We've got our own zip code, 
and our own listserv, a private email discussion group, to go with it. People 
sometimes look at me oddly when I tell them about this; like, isn't it 
*redundant* or something? Couldn't we all just lean out our windows and 
*yell* to each other? Granted, one of the strengths of online is that it 
collapses physical space. Groups coalesce around common interests regardless 
of where the participants live in real life. I could be shoulder to shoulder 
in the virtual world, talking about cats or cooking or contemporary fiction, 
with someone in Kuala Lumpur.

The local email loop works because of shared interests, too -- concern for 
the community, and for the issues, large and small, that make up our daily 
lives. Has anyone else spotted the young mountain lion pair that's rumored to 
be ranging through the hills? What's this I hear about cutting our postal 
service? Don't forget to vote YES on the ambulance initiative. 

The editor of the weekly newspaper is online, as are some of our elected 
officials. The deputy sheriff emerged from the shadows of lurkerdom in the 
midst of a heated - and of course highly theoretical -- debate about whether 
the "looky-lous" who poked along below the speed limit on our scenic two-lane 
highway were worse than the people who tailgated them. In California, we 
learned, if you've got 5 cars behind you, you're required by law to pull over 
and let them pass. Who said the Internet wasn't educational?

Sometimes our listserv plays an eminently practical role, a bulletin board in 
the true sense: Who's a good person to call for firewood, someone who'll 
deliver an honest cord? Anyone got a truck I can borrow to do some hauling? 
But it's more than that. For a relative newcomer like me, the ongoing email 
discussion is a window into the accumulated folk wisdom of the region, and a 
crash course in cultural values. 

It seems to be working the other way, too. I'm a newbie here, but I'm a long-
time resident of cyberspace. For some of my neighbors, participation in this 
listserv is an early and tentative step into a world I know very well. This 
may be their first exposure to the urban legends -- the $500 cookie story, 
the Good Times virus - that we seasoned Netizens greet with a yawn, assuming 
we react at all. They sometimes wonder, irritably, why we can't stick to the 
subject, or complain about the sheer volume of messages being posted to the 
list. They haven't yet learned that the nature of online conversation *is* 
drift, and that almost-too-active-to-keep-up-with is one of the signs of a 
healthy virtual space. Someone may discover the hard way, by bumping up 
against someone else's feelings, that sarcasm doesn't work well in ASCII, and 
that those obnoxious little smileyfaces do, in fact, serve a purpose.  Living 
as neighbors in real life, sharing a common fate *outside* cyberspace, gives 
us a huge stake in working out our differences. We have a lot to learn from 
each other. 
-------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Making Book on It (c) February 1997, Reva Basch

Berkeley, where I spent my dissolute youth, is awash in more than tie-dye and 
the fragrance of patchouli oil. It's an absolute haven for booklovers. There 
are more bookstores per capita, I'd estimate, than anyplace else in the 
country except maybe Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Berkeley of the East. 
Although the big chains are trying to gain a foothold, the real treasures are 
the smaller independent stores that know their stock and their customers' 
tastes. That's especially true in one-bookstore-and-lucky-to-have-it towns 
like the one I live in now. No towering pyramid of the New York Times' Best 
Sellers here; the selection is small and reflects both the owners' interests 
and the community's needs. Special orders? No problem; as long as it's in 
print, you'll have it within a week, no extra charge. 

Given my small-is-beautiful bias, you'd think I'd be appalled at the 
proliferation of bookstores on the Net. What could be more impersonal than 
ordering something, sight-unseen, by filling in a form at a Web site and, 
some days later, picking up a hermetically-sealed UPS carton on your 
doorstep? Well, for one thing, not everybody has ready access to a good 
bookstore, or the inclination to seek one out. The more channels of 
distribution, the more encouragement to read, the better. Besides, books
books are a perfect commodity to sell online. They're modular, easy to 
package and unbreakable. They have a long shelf life. There are hundreds of 
thousands of different titles that appeal to all kinds of potential 
customers, but you can market them all the same way.

Or can you? Book buying is more complicated than picking out a movie at the 
video store. There's no mass market Siskel and Ebert telling America what to 
read. Most devoted readers wouldn't listen to them, anyway; they rely on 
word-of-mouth from friends, knowledgeable reviews and recommendations. Some 
online bookstores do an admirable job of personalizing the book-browsing 
experience. Amazon.com (www.amazon.com), one of the largest of the lot, not 
only points you to bargains, staff favorites and books in areas related to 
the one you're browsing in, but will keep an eye out for new arrivals by 
authors or on topics that interest you, and notify you by email when they're 
available. Readers are encouraged to post their own reviews of books they've 
read. Authors can get into the fun, too, with interviews, comments and 
rebuttals. Ordering a gift book? Amazon even gives you a choice of wrapping 
paper. 

Though its founder would probably detest the comparison, Amazon.com is like 
the Borders or the Barnes & Noble of the cyber-bookstore world. Like the 
river it was named for, it's a big operation. Its goal is to carry every 
title in print, special-order on request, and satisfy as many customers as it 
can. The real-world Borders and B&N, though they have plans to sell on the 
Net, haven't yet opened their doors for electronic commerce. But a variety of 
other bookstores have. The legendary Powell's in Portland, Oregon, reputed to 
be the largest independent bookseller in the U.S., sells used, antiquarian 
and hard-to-find books online as well as more mainstream stock 
(www.powells.com). Smaller outfits like BookServe (www.bookserve.com) shoot 
for comprehensiveness while still emphasizing customer service. Specialty 
bookstores abound; there's one for dog lovers and several for cooks and for 
travelers. There are childrens' bookstores and shops that specialize in books 
on tape. Not surprisingly, considering the demographics of the Net, there are 
dozens of bookstores specializing in computers, science fiction and other 
nerdly preoccupations. The American Booksellers Association site 
(www.bookweb.org/directory/) will lead you to most of these and more. 

Most of the better online bookstores are still small, independent businesses, 
like the helpful booksellers in town. I'll shop at one or another, depending 
on the weather, my mood, and what I'm looking for. I may not get the full-
spectrum Berkeley experience, but at least I get a choice. 
------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Surprise! (c) March 1997, Reva Basch

Whenever I see an envelope addressed in my friend Sondra's familiar 
handwriting, I treat it like a loaded missile. It's not that what she's 
written is explosive; she just loves to pack her notecards and letters with a 
quarter cup or so of rainbow-colored, often creatively-shaped glitter. Taken 
unawares, I've had to vacuum semi-microscopic stars, angels or dollar signs 
out of my sofa and carpet for months thereafter. As far as I'm concerned, 
Sondra should be honored by the computer industry for prototyping the 
multimedia email experience. 

Discovering that I could attach things -- a beautifully formatted 20-page 
report, photos from a party, an audio clip saying "Elvis has left the 
building," a copy of a neat shareware program I'd found -- to a standard 
email message was a major "Aha!" No more waiting while diskettes made their 
way cross-country in padded envelopes. No more protocol transfer tennis -- 
uploading files to an online service, typing some arcane Unix incantation to 
"unprotect" it, and hoping my intended recipients had the geek-smarts to 
download it successfully on their end -- which, often, they did not. 

Once you're proficient at zapping files back and forth through email, it's 
like having your own express courier service, essentially for free. So much 
originates in computerized form these days -- documents, images, video and 
sound files -- or can be scanned into bits and bytes, and practically 
everything that starts out digitally can be transmitted that way, too. Does 
typing seem too cold and impersonal for a thank-you note or a letter to an 
old friend? Invest in a customized handwriting font based on a sample of your 
own writing (Signature Software at www.sigsft.com is just one of dozens 
advertised on the Web) ; then choose an attractive, understated background, 
et voila! -- a semblance of a personal letter. Or try Postcards from the Net 
(www.coolcards.com), software that lets you design your own colorful 
electronic notes. Miss Manners might object; none of this has quite the class 
of a communique written in ink on fine linen-finish stationery. But maybe 
someday it will. 

Email managers like Eudora, AOL's post office and Netscape Mail make email 
"enclosures" a no-brainer. (Clue: If a program uses a paper clip icon for its 
file attachment function, it almost certainly has your interests at heart. ) 
It's going to get even easier: Netscape president Jim Barksdale predicts that 
pretty soon, email will look just like a Web page. (Of course, he would. ) 
Instead of downloading attachments to a directory on your computer, the way 
most mail programs work now, then having to open the right application -- 
Acrobat, Photoshop, QuickTime or whatever -- to view them, you'll see a fully 
integrated, multimedia piece of mail that you can "play" without exiting your 
Web browser. If the Webocentric view is right, we're going to be looking at 
everything from video games to corporate financial statements through the 
frame of our browsers. Relating to email that way makes sense; we're already 
accustomed to thinking of Web sites in terms of documents and pages. Adding 
"letter" to the metaphorical mix isn't much of a stretch. 

Email is the most popular Net application by far. For many folks, email is 
what "being on the Internet" means. Along with the innate human urge to 
communicate comes a quest for higher bandwidth, an attempt to replicate as 
much as possible of the in-person experience, including nudges, winks, tone 
of voice and cute snapshots of the kids.

There is a downside to movies (or whatever)-in-your-mailbox: Take reasonable 
precautions when opening any file you receive in email, especially if you 
don't recognize the return address. It's on your disk now, remember, and 
there's always a chance that the package you're unwrapping contains a live, 
executable virus. That's the principle behind the "Good Times" virus story -- 
a hoax, fortunately -- that periodically sweeps the Net. Most mail 
attachments are harmless. But those unsolicited data bits have a way of 
accumulating in the virtual cracks and crevices of your hard drive. The 
danger of a virtual Unabomber is slight, but beware of Sondras sprinkling 
glitter. 
----------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: My Annual Rant (c) April 1997, Reva Basch

"On line" means the telephone, too. That stunning insight hit me after half 
an hour of easy-listening elevator music while on hold for what the software 
company whimsically called "customer support." I'd reached about the third 
circle of voicemail hell, I calculated, and could probably survive another 
few minutes of John Denver, as long as they didn't start tormenting me with 
string arrangements of early Beatles hits. 

I'm a pretty low maintenance user. I hardly ever call for help. When I do, 
I've already checked out the obvious (like, is it plugged in?) and done the 
basic drill: Exit your applications, remove TSRs, reboot, yada yada yada. 
I've designed software and beta tested it and tried to make it break. I can 
usually tell what conditions are normal and recoverable-from, and when the 
program's merely confused. I'm the alpha geek in a household that includes an 
electrical engineer; for an English major, that's quite an accomplishment. 

It started when I had to reinstall a popular word-processing program -- you 
know, the application I make my living with -- and discovered that a crucial 
file had rotted away. I knew I was in trouble when my two-year-old version of 
the software was missing from the voicemail menu. "Press 9 for all other 
options" does not portend high-priority attention. Toll-free support lines? 
Forget it. This was my dime, multiplied by the 49 minutes it took to get 
through to an actual human being. He told me about the company's secret BBS 
(like the ones early computerists used before the Internet took over) and 
advised me to dial up and download a certain cryptically-named replacement 
file. How charming, I thought, and the opportunity to make another toll call, 
too.

The BBS wouldn't log me in. By then, of course, it was after five and 
customer support was locked up for the night. Why not, I wondered, use a 
secure Web server instead, with file transfer protocol built in? Why not 
offer to send me -- a registered user of this software and its previous 
incarnations since 1986 -- a replacement disk? As it turned out, I faxed them 
an amusingly (it made me laugh, anyway) abusive letter, appending to the 
signature line all my mighty journalistic affiliations, and had my 
replacement copy two days later. Thank you, W---P------. I still love your 
product, but your customer service sucks. 

My trials weren't over. The very same week, when I tried logging in to one of 
my Net accounts, I found that it had been cancelled without notice. Email to 
Support produced a robot-mail reply. Email to Accounts generated a list of 
options, none of them relevant. Eventually -- I'll spare you the details -- 
it emerged that all they needed was a new credit card expiration date. It's 
hard to believe that a company that drops customers for no apparent reason 
could grow into one of the largest Internet Service Providers around. They 
weren't as cavalier about their client base when they were new and 
struggling. I remember; I was there. 

Maybe that's part of it. Does a company have to be young and eager to provide 
decent customer support? I'm thinking of the ISP who drove over to my house 
when he couldn't solve my PowerBook connectivity problems, and the one who, 
seeing me logged in at 6 o'clock one morning, called and asked "Would this be 
a good time for me to walk you through that Win95 dialup configuration?" 

Startup-eagerness-to-please can't be the whole story. Hewlett-Packard has 
great customer support; in my experience, it's the Nordstrom of the high tech 
world. Too often, though, quality falls off, as small ventures grow too 
quickly to hire and train good staff, or they realize that to survive at all, 
they've got to focus on the big-bucks corporate clients and let smaller 
customers fend for themselves. Call me old-fashioned, but there's something 
to be said for keeping your loyal users satisfied, no matter what. 
Squandering goodwill en route to success is, in Bob Dylan's words, "no 
success at all." Put that on your voicemail, Nyetcom. 
------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Unplugged (c) May 1997, Reva Basch

The good news was: a 10-day trip to China. The bad news was: with my mother. 
It's not that Mom and I don't get along; she's an experienced traveler, hell 
on wheelies when it comes to toting her own luggage, and in full possession 
of that most valuable touristic commodity, a sense of humor. But it was a 
long time since we'd last roomed together, and who could foresee what bizarre 
maladaptive behaviors might emerge under the stress of being strangers in a 
strange land?

I tried not to think about the =other= downside: being offline for almost two 
weeks. I took my cue from friends who'd found it easier to quit smoking if 
they cut out coffee at the same time. I could manage Net-withdrawal, I 
figured, as long as I immersed myself in the local culture and avoided 
computer magazines, questions about my job, anything that would trigger the 
impulse to log in. So I packed an ample supply of paperbacks, practiced 
describing myself, tersely, as "a writer," purged my mind of the rumors I'd 
heard about an Internet I in Beijing, and just about managed to convince 
myself that 10 days of digital denial would be a spiritual exercise, 
harmoniously in keeping with my journey to the East. 

After 22 hours en route, a rendezvous with a surly guide who insisted on 
whisking us directly from the airport to the Forbidden City, and my first 
culture-shocked encounter with Chinese plumbing, we finally reached our hotel 
room. Jet-lagged to the point of hallucination, I staggered to the window to 
check out our view of Beijing. Directly across the street was a yellow brick 
building with 2-foot tall red lettering spelling out, in English and 
(presumably) Chinese: INTERNET. 

Later that day, when we were rested and ready to explore, the Internet 
building was nowhere to be found. At street level, it didn't seem to exist. 
It was like a yellow brick Brigadoon, vanishing and reappearing in the mist. 
I took its elusiveness as a portent, and renewed my temporary vows of cyber-
celibacy. This tour would feature the Cybernaut - Unplugged. 

It wasn't as hard as I'd feared. Immersed in shrines and artifacts that had 
acquired a patina of antiquity before our Liberty Bell was cast, there wasn't 
much to trigger the modem-connect blues. Toward the end of our journey, when 
Mom got around to asking me "What's the difference between 'online' and 'the 
Internet'?" it took a while not only to come up with a coherent answer, but 
to remember why I was supposed to care. 

Despite my hard-core research credentials, I have to admit that I don't read 
reviews until after I've seen the movie, and I seldom pore seriously through 
the guidebooks before I visit the places described. I like to form my own 
impressions. Now that I'm back, though, I'm all over the Net, soaking up 
information about China. There's the business-like China Today site 
(www.chinatoday.com), the ambitious and award-winning Chinascape 
(qww.chinascape.org), and the lovely but Chinese-language-only ChinaByte 
(www.chinabyte.com). My current favorite is the China Guide Company 
(www.china-guide.com), which bills itself as "the gateway to Chinese 
culture." China Guide provides a taste of everything, from jade carving to 
regional dishes to traditional Eastern medicine. It reminded me of China 
itself - the ever-present souvenir vendors, Mom's efforts to master 
chopsticks (hint: a Beijing duck dinner is not the place to start), and our 
odd little tour of a Chinese pharmacy in Guilin, with its display of dried 
cicadas, centipedes, and snakes.

China's official attitude toward the Internet, and the uncensored global 
communication it represents, has been fraught with fear and repression. This 
summer, the world will be watching as the highly-westernized Hong Kong 
reverts to Chinese control. It may be too much to expect that the powers-
that-be will lighten up and learn to love the Net. But who knows? Maybe the 
next time I visit Beijing, I'll track down that yellow brick building across 
from the DeBao Hotel.
-------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Digital Pack-Ratting (c) June 1997, Reva Basch

Struck by a rare burst of organizational zeal, I decided one fine spring 
morning to de-clutter my filing cabinets. I started with the most formidable 
one, the one with all four drawers helpfully labeled "It Might Be In Here." I 
spent the rest of the day sitting on the floor, surrounded by the paper trail 
of my life so far: baby pictures, high school essays, Grateful Dead concert 
stubs, love letters, insurance policies, expired passports, appliance 
manuals, yellowed newspaper clippings stuffed in folders labeled "Food," 
"Travel," and "Misc-Funny." That last one sounded like the name of a Usenet 
newsgroup, and I began to wonder. Are file cabinet manufacturers feeling the 
effects of the Web?

I'm a pack rat from way back. Sorting through the detritus of several 
decades, it struck me that so much of what I've collected over the years -- 
tips on pruning roses, lists of good cheap hotels in New York city, fourth-
generation photocopies of office folklore like "10 Types of People You Meet 
in a Public Restroom" -- is now up on the Net somewhere -- current, in full 
color, a click or two away. Even though the Web's chaotic cataloging system 
is no improvement on my own, its search engines can cut through the clutter 
immeasurably faster than my own feeble fingers can find and pull a tattered 
article from a bulging cardboard file. 

Recipes are my particular weakness. True confession: The very first software 
package I bought, even before I'd finalized the deal for my IBM XT, was a 
menu-organizing program called Micro Cookbook. But the day I discovered 
Epicurious.com, The Internet Chef (www.ichef.com), and especially the 
towering testimony to ethnic diversity, creative cooking, and the powerful 
motivating force of the late-night munchies known as SOAR, the Searchable 
Online Archive of Recipes, my compulsive clipping and burying -- I mean, 
filing -- behavior was history. Why relegate your food cravings to crumbling 
scraps of paper when 15 seconds at http://soar.Berkeley.edu/recipes/ produces 
exactly the pasta al quattro formaggi -- or the macaroni and cheese -- you've 
been hungering for?

In manufacturing, there's a concept called "just-in-time." You don't stock 
the parts until you're ready to build the product. Now that newspapers are 
publishing on the web, and experts of all sorts -- gardeners, travelers, 
holistic health mavens, audiophiles, you name it -- have put up informational 
sites and are trading tips daily in Usenet newsgroups, it hardly makes sense 
to accumulate masses of random data -- on paper or on your own hard drive -- 
in anticipation of conceivable future need. One of my wise cyber-cronies, 
realizing that a mutual acquaintance was downloading and storing every cool 
web site she came across, uttered the Zenlike statement: "It's enough to know 
that there's an ocean out there; you don't have to take a picture of every 
wave."

The proto-Apple interface designers who came up with the familiar files-and-
folders metaphor were directly addressing the human urge to squirrel things 
away. They had documents in mind, but now that scanners are getting to be 
common household appliances like fax machines, even intimate personal 
artifacts can go digital. I know an otherwise functional adult who's put his 
first grade report card on his home page. Others have turned their web sites 
into online scrapbooks; for thousands of people, that's what the Web is for. 
Given unlimited time and disk space, there's no reason why you couldn't back 
up all the souvenirs of life into a few hundred megabytes of virtual file 
cabinet.

Virtual storage isn't nearly as bulky as the kind that involves actual 
furniture. Archive your entire past on one of those spiffy new Zip drives and 
just stick it in a drawer somewhere. Of course, you'll have to sacrifice the 
delicate, crackly texture of those ancient Broadway show programs, the faint 
perfume of that pressed prom corsage, the subtle iridescence of the ink on 
those old letters -- but think of all the room you'll save. Anyone want to 
buy a slightly-used file cabinet? I can use the space for my new scanner. 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: CULTivating the Net (c) July 1997, Reva Basch

Every few weeks I put on my trend-watcher goggles and look at my daily paper 
from a different perspective: What can I learn, from reading between the 
lines, about technology's relentless march? How pervasive has the Net become? 
It's all over the business section, of course, but now and then it ripples 
into general news: The California state government is considering putting 
alternative bridge designs on the Web and letting taxpayers vote for which 
one they prefer (No guarantee, of course, that they'll listen to what we tell 
them). Internet kiosks have been installed at the airport so travelers can 
check their email - at no charge, until they're hooked - while running to 
catch their flights. 

The really telling evidence, though, is down in the fine print: look at all 
those cartoonists, columnists and correspondents with email or Web addresses. 
It's becoming an open channel for two-way communication with members of the 
press. 

Most of the time, though, when the Internet become front-page news, it seems 
the news is bad: pornography, repressive legislation, and the strange, sad 
Heaven's Gate/Higher Source suicides. If you were lucky, you managed to 
absorb some sane and balanced commentary along with the sensationalized 
"Internet cult" coverage. If every pale, oddly dressed, undersocialized Web 
geek was, ipso facto, a member of some "Internet cult," that would make San 
Francisco's multimedia gulch Cult Central. But nobody's forcing those people 
to drink café lattes and code on into the night. 

The Net is no more a cult recruiting ground than your local college campus. 
There is a lot of weird stuff out there; that's not surprising when you 
consider the traditional overlapp between computer technoids and science-
fiction fandom. Dozens of Web sites sprang up in anticipation of comet Hale-
Bopp's arrival to discuss its mysterious "companion object." Try 
http://205.243.132.23/comet-1.html for an extensive list of links. In 
newsgroups like alt.sci.physics.new-theories, alt.alien.visitors, and 
alt.paranet.ufo, the skeptics and the true believers wage ongoing 
intellectual battles - sometimes fierce, but often painstakingly polite - 
about the origin of crop circles, the existence of extraterrestrial life, and 
the true nature of the universe.

According to my friend Jer, a trained engineer who follows such debates from 
the viewpoint of an interested but objective investigator, the real strength 
of the Net is its refusal to accept things at face value. Posts from places 
as diverse as Argentina, Israel and Norway contribute their unique 
perspectives. By its very nature, the Internet is the antithesis of 
"cultlike" thinking. There's no consensus, no charismatic guru, no 
universally accepted belief. Fringies, flakes, and B.S.-ers are quickly 
spotted and discredited, or simply ignored until they go away. It's almost 
impossible for anyone, whether crazy or profoundly wise, to gain much of a 
following online. The Net is a hotbed of uncontrollable creativity, a 
chaotic, juicy agglomeration of first-person reports and opinions that seldom 
make it into the mainstream news. 

In part, that's because much of what's posted on the Net is out-and-out 
insane. The downside of free speech for all is the low signal-to-noise ratio 
that results. There's no officially certified media spokesperson or 
scientific expert, no trusted Uncle Walter or Surgeon General of the Net to 
point you toward what's useful and important. It's up to every one of us to 
sift fact from fiction, reality from rhetoric, and to determine for ourselves 
whether a source is as reliable as he, she, or it purports to be. That 
thought probably gives would-be cybercult leaders nightmares - the Net is the 
last place you'd think they'd look for gullible recruits. 

Speaking of cults and nightmares, page 5 of my local paper tells me that 
Charles Manson, now 62 (fun flies when you're doing time) has been denied 
parole again. That's OK, says Charlie; he's involved in too many things to be 
free now anyway. In fact, he's working on his own Web site.

------------------------------------

The Cybernaut: Sailing the Cs (c) August 1997, Reva Basch

Maybe it's some mystical resonance with the letter C, but Cyberspace seems to 
attract a disproportionate share of C-words -- content, chat, community, 
communications, conferencing, connection, commerce, and convergence.

From its beginnings as a virtual meeting ground for academics, the big draw 
of the Net has been its ability to connect us with other people. Email was 
its first "killer app." Many folks equate "being on the Internet" with having 
an email address; as long as they can keep in touch with their key-pals, 
they're as wired as they wanna be. 

Online community is such a powerful force that it's one of the few categories 
of Web-based content, aside from a handful of 'zines and news-alert services, 
that people are willing to pay for. Since 1985 (in Internet years, roughly 
equivalent to the Middle Ages), thousands have forked over 10 or 15 bucks a 
month (plus, at times, connect charges) for access to The WELL and its 
hundreds of ongoing discussion areas. In modern times, AOL discovered the 
secret to its success -- chat rooms, which account for a large chunk of the 
time and money its users spend online. 

Chat, in the form of IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, has long been a part of Net 
culture. Insomniacs can join a channel and be sure of finding someone to 
connect to, somewhere in the world, regardless of the hour. Recently, chat 
has become Web-friendly, with ventures like iChat (http://www.ichat.com/), 
eShare (http://www.eshare.com), Talk City (http://www.talkcity.com/), 
PeopleLink (www.peoplelink.com), WebChat (http://wbs.net), Planet Direct 
(www.planetdirect.com) and Ding! (http://www.activerse.com) all encouraging 
us to talk up a storm in real-time with old friends and new net-buddies 
alike.Yahoo (http://chat.yahoo.com/)  and Pathfinder (http://pathfinder.com) 
have set up chat channels. Hundreds of other sites, including household names 
like***, are encouraging Net-cruisers to stick around and become Net-
schmoozers, too. 

Local community-fostering sites like GeoCities (www.geocities.com), Sidewalk 
(www.sidewalk.com) and CitySearch (www.citysearch.com) are staking out 
virtual territory and hammering away on their infrastructure like boom towns 
in the wake of a gold rush. Talk may be cheap, but Netrepreneurs are hoping 
it translates into big bucks. 

The recent interest in fostering social interaction online has very little to 
do with world peace and understanding, and everything to do with the 
commodification of community. We're on the high C's, now, and we're 
surrounded by sharks. Net.marketeers don't really expect us to forge deep and 
meaningful relationships around jeans, fabric softener, or even our favorite 
movies and CDs. They figure that, by attracting certain age, income and 
interest groups to their sites, keeping them there long enough to hold 
conversations and bond with their peers, and bringing them back to sustain 
those connections, they'll be able to deliver an attractive marketing package 
to potential advertisers and other commercial interests. It's every bit as 
calculated as selling commercial time based on audience demographics for 
Seinfeld or 60 Minutes. If that's what it takes to support worthwhile content 
on the Web, cool. Just don't confuse commercials with community and nobody 
will get hurt.

That danger does exist. At least one interactive ad agency has developed 
robot ads, clued to the content of your conversation and designed to pop up 
in mid-chat. You might be talking about what to cook for dinner and trigger 
an ad or, worse, be joined by a virtual presence that suggests a name brand 
frozen pizza or your neighborhood burger place. On the Internet, nobody knows 
you're a shill? Don't bet on it. To its credit, the agency has modified its 
original concept toward the less-obnoxious end of the scale. A sneakier, less 
ethical firm might not -- and agent technology is getting smarter all the 
time. 

When I was in college, the big-deal date restaurant was a homey little place 
in an alleyway, called The 3 C's. I never knew what those Cs represented, but 
I liked to imagine that they stood for candlelight, chianti and conversation. 
Can Cyberspace maintain equally genuine hangouts of its own?

Reva Basch lives and works in a cottage by the C.