Astronomers once believed that Mercury --the innermost planet of the solar system-- orbited in such a way that it always presented the same face to the sun. The planet they envisioned was an almost perfect Danté-esque model of heaven and hell: One side a molten inferno of liquefied rock and boiling metals, the other a frigid wasteland locked in eternal night.
They also envisioned a sort of purgatory; a narrow twilight strip running directly down the middle of the planet where dark met light, where blazing sun and the near-absolute zero of space clashed and canceled each other out. In recent years, this model has been proven flatly wrong. Mercury does indeed rotate, and both hemispheres of the planet are alternately scorched and flash-frozen as it whizzes around the sun.
That is disappointing, in way, because the twilight band between ultimate day and ultimate night was a beautiful image. A generation of science fiction writers used it to represent the clash between good and evil, heaven and hell, man and uncaring nature, you name it.
And it keeps coming back to me as I stare at a huge pile of books about the Internet, and read the listings announcing more every day. These books exist in a twilight band of their own; in that place of transition between the cool culture of everyday life and the blazingly hot world of Netculture. They exist between the printed page and the cathode ray tube. Between a one-way television-based mass culture, and an interactive, individualized, tribal culture.
Virtually all of these books urge you not to believe the "information superhighway" hype. Virtually all of the authors caution that "we're not there yet" and the Net won't become a truly global phenomenon until well into the next century.
On a literal level this in no doubt true. From another perspective it is reverse hype using reverse clichés. The Internet has been so overpromoted and so overexamined that we are already experiencing something of a cultural backlash against it. Just open your daily newspaper and look for the inevitable "Nazis on the Net" story.
More realistically speaking, the Internet is changing certain basic assumptions about society at a breathtaking pace. It won't change the world as we know it tomorrow, but the day after tomorrow is a different story. The very existence of these books and some of the brand new imprints which publish them are proof enough of that.
The growth if the Net itself has fostered a huge resurgence in correspondence and the printed word. The spectacular growth of the World Wide Web portion of the Internet since its inception in 1991 is nothing less than the birth of an entirely new medium. A different kind of publishing which complements books and magazines.
In The Canadian Business Guide to Using the Internet, author and computer columnist Linda Richards rightfully likens trying to explain it to imagining "Jell-O sushi. Kumquats that fly. Walking on your head... For the uninitiated," she continues, "imagining the Internet is a lot like any of these examples: they are out of our experience and unlike anything that has existed before."
This is undoubtedly true, and undoubtedly why the majority of books currently coming out about the Internet are aimed at new users or those hovering on the edge. Richards' book is a case in point. It is aimed primarily at businesses not currently on the Net, and with no clear idea what it can do for them. In a slim 133 pages she manages to cover the basics quite well; She explain the Net's traditional antipathy to overt advertising, and provides a fairly complete list of Canadian business resources.
She also manages to cover general Internet territory quite well, providing the history, definitions, service provider lists, and general resources necessary to anyone braving the Net for the first time. There's even a chapter on "Resources for Fun and Family" guaranteed to send your average MBA screaming for cover. About the only thing I didn't like about this book were David Middleton's cartoons, which are frankly, boring.
Internet Roadside Attractions, by a collective of writers, and Walking the World Wide Web by Sharon Turlington are both examples of this new kind of book. The Internet is a functioning anarchy, controlled by no one, constantly in a state of flux. Any roadmap to a place like this becomes obsolete almost the day it's written. At least two World Wide Web sites mentioned in Internet Roadside Attractions were no longer there when I went looking for them. One site mentioned in Walking the World Wide Web had changed both server and address. That's why Ventana Press maintains a Web site of its own. On-line versions of Internet Roadside Attractions and Walking the World Wide Web are maintained there, updated on an almost daily basis. You do, however, require a CD-ROM drive in addition to a modem and an Internet account to access them properly.
Both books are quite good. The literary style is breezy, the inevitable Internet backgrounders are brief and to the point, and the lion's share of pages are devoted to the reason you bought them in the first place: lists and reviews of neat places to go on the Net. Looking for the complete downloadable works of Shakespeare? The Canada Open Government Pilot? The Science Fiction Resource Guide? Tourist information about Iceland? These are the books for you, whether or not you ever access the on-line versions.
It's harder to recommend Paul Gilster's The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface and Stephen Gauer's Using Mosaic for Windows. Both are attractive, clear, largely well-written books published in 1995. But such is the rate of change on the Internet that they are already almost as obsolete as your old Betamax instruction manual. NCSA Mosaic, a truly remarkable piece of software, has already largely been superseded by Netscape, a newer product which may itself be booted out of the limelight by the time these words see print. Nevertheless, since Netscape and Mosaic were created by the same programmers, there are enough similarities between the programs to make these books useful as primers, if nothing else.
The Internet by Paul Hoffman is a chatty, light, basic introduction to the Internet, based on the PBS television series The Internet Show. By page nine Hoffman has more than adequately defined all of the basic terminology you need to know, and he spins the history of the Internet in a readable, exciting way. Unfortunately, in places, Hoffman's style tends to slip into a kind of Dick and Jane sing-song, complete with exclamation marks. You can too easily imagine the book being read aloud by an over-enthusiastic grade-school teacher.
From a design point of view The Internet is easily the most attractive book of the lot, with full colour photos and illustrations liberally scattered throughout. Certain graphics integrating text are just too small to read, however, an unpardonable oversight in a book with so much waste white space. On the other hand, the informative sidebars are a joy, and make working your way through the Internet's acronym soup almost bearable. Despite my quibbles, I'd have to say that this book is indispensable to Internet newbies.
The Canadian Internet Handbook: 1995 Edition by Jim Carroll and Rick Broadhead is equally indispensable if you want the Canadian point of view on this society-shaking phenomenon. Carroll and Broadhead pretty quickly dispense with the chic view of the Net as completely supranational medium breaking down the barriers between cultures. Canada is the second-most important country attached to the Net, both in terms of operating host servers and (probably) users, and the Net's evolution has been an independent phenomenon in this country. The growth of CA*net, the publicly-funded portion of the Internet in Canada, can easily be likened to the building of the CPR in the 19th century, or the CBC in the early 20th. It just happened far more quickly and far more quietly.
Other text sections in the book are equally interesting, particularly those dealing with ordinary Canadians and how they are using the Internet in their personal and professional lives. The "Introduction to the Internet" chapters are somewhat more complex than those in the Hoffman book, but they are well-structured and generally sufficient to get you started if this is the only book you buy. The directories of Canadian service providers and resources which make up the bulk of the book are quite exhaustive. It doesn't make for light bedtime reading, but then, it's not supposed to.
Overall I was quite satisfied with this lot of books. Generally, they accomplish what they set out to accomplish, and they prove by their very existence that the paradigm of the book is still very much alive and well, even in these interconnected days.
What they and the many thousands of other books like them don't do is provide much reflection or analysis of the phenomenon they are discussing. As Montreal computer writer and poet Matthew Friedman said in a recent column: "Far from being a network of disembodied ideas and dry, technical correspondence, the internet is a thriving community, where people meet, talk, argue, and fall in love... Above all, the Net is not about technology, though technology has made it possible -- it's about people."
Too many of these books, unfortunately, are not.
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Before I start in on the the Internet, the international network of computer networks, I'm going to digress into astronomy for a moment. Please bear with me; there is a point to this.
THE CANADIAN BUSINESS GUIDE TO USING THE INTERNET, Linda Richards; $14.95 paper 0-88-908-849-7, 133 pp, 5-1/2 x 8-1/2, Self-Counsel Press. Reviewed from finished book.
THE MOSAIC NAVIGATOR, Paul Gilster; 0-471-11336-0, 243 pp, 7-1/2 x 9, paper, Wiley. Reviewed from finished book.
USING MOSAIC FOR WINDOWS, Stephen Gauer; paper 0-9698853-0-X, 101 pp, 8-1/2 x 11 Electric Avenue Press. Reviewed from finished book.
INTERNET ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS, Gareth Branwyn, Sean Carton, Luke Duncan, Tom Lichty, Donald Rose, Shannon Turlington, Jan Weingarten; US$29.95 paper 1-56604-193-7, 319 pp, 8 x 10 Ventana Press. Reviewed from finished book.
WALKING THE WORLD WIDE WEB, Shannon Turlington; US$29.95 paper 1-56604-208-9, 322 pp, 8x 10 Ventana Press. Reviewed from finished book.
THE INTERNET, Paul Hoffman, edited by John R. Levine; $39.99 paper 1-56884-461-1, 210 pp, 10-1/2 x 8-1/2 Compaq Press/IDG Books. Reviewed from finished book.
CANADIAN INTERNET HANDBOOK 1995 EDITION, Jim Carroll and Rick Broadhead; $21.95 paper 0-13-329-9350-5 798 pp., 7 x 9 Prentice-Hall Canada. Reviewed from finished book.