2/5/98...Wipeout.

If you've tried to call our number in the evening for the last few weeks, you've probably gotten a busy signal. That's right, this neonerd has been up surfing the web by nightlight. I'd say spending an inordinate amount of time there, except it's all too ordinate, as my server reminds me monthly.

It's a jungle out there, ain't it? And I've had trouble sorting the forest from the trees. So many twigs and branches, so little lumber. A riotous explosion of information, like a million monkeys with typewriters. Utterly fascinating.

Live cam shots of Everest and Antarctica, Maui and Rockland harbor. Today's news from Hong Kong and Capetown, or St. John's, Newfoundland. Simulated images of planets circling distant stars, and the tensegrity structures of molecular biology. Medieval emblems in distant libraries, and satellite shots of where you are right now. Yammering newsgroupies and indepth analyses of arcane topics. Sources of exotic wood and the specs for on-demand hotwater heaters. The big three at Yalta, or woodcuts by Barlach. Discount ink and hot software. You want it, we got it.

If you can find it.

It's a bit like reading a hi tech Uncle Henry's (our weekly classified shopper). At first the shear diversity is wonderful. Like a cosmopolitan airport after a year in the bush. Just take a seat and enjoy the show. Whoa, was that a cross-dresser doing live techno from Amsterdam?... Oh, you were trying to get somewhere?

That was my first mistake. I'd assumed that I could simply execute a search for a particular piece of information, go to the right site, and download. I thought the web was an intercontinental library. Find the card catalog, get the location, open the book.

HAH. This ain't no archive, this ain't no bookshelf. As a structured source of information the internet will give you a headache. And vertigo. Trying to find a specific bit of data, I'd get so frustrated chasing wild geese and red herrings, I'd howl like a dog. But the scent kept driving me crazy, and I'd come back sniffing for more.

My first breakthrough was realizing that the web is more like a city market, a rialto, a crossroads bazaar. You might find what you want, a bargain even, but the real joy is in all the serendippities. Just wade in and enjoy it. Wooh.. live feed from Brit pirate radio. The entire text of Tom Paine. All of Dylan's lyrics. Suspend your critical judgment until you figure what kind of beast this is.

So while I'm stumbling around, groping the elephant, I'm actually learning the architecture. Forget target objects. Think landscape. Let go of content, momentarily, and see form.

Part of my quest is to see what kind of sites are out there, because I want to play with the medium myself. Viewed as a grab-bag of creative styles, web sites run the gamut from pretentious overload to primitive ephemera; tightly controlled, to amorphous meandering: free and user friendly, to expensive authoritarian institutionalizations. A hot site is a joy.

I begin to see that the structure of sites is as crucial to successful searching as the authority and extensiveness of the content. Popular Mechanics is a great source for tech news.. in the print version. As a site it is so graphic heavy and server-slow as to be inaccessible. The Encyclopedia Britannica is supposed to be the be-all and end-all, but who's going to pay $85 for an occasional lookup? I don't care enough about what the Wall Street Journal has to say to buy a hefty subscription. While the dinos stomp about, the mice evolve. And it's the inventive site makers who are shaping this mental space. Yes, Marshall, the medium IS.

A new medium retrains our perceptions, modifies our habits, teaches us how to dance with the elephant. Changes us. This young web is awkward, headstrong, suffering from growing pains.. and it inflicts all that on the initiate. We get used to waiting for downloads, but only so long. We learn to check URLs before hyperlinking, to get a sense of who sez and where he's at. We juggle bookmarks, toggle back and around. Of necessity we adapt to the software, and find our way around in it. The issues of Microsoft and Netscape, the direction of the industry, become newsworthy to us.

Web pages are graphic maps, and we don't read them like a book. Or even like a conventional magazine, which is the contemporary reference modality. WIRED Magazine is my navigation mark. Six months ago I couldn't even read it. It was too visually jumbled. I habitually read column text and ignore ads in magazines, but in WIRED how do you separate them? It gave me the same queasiness I got surfing. All that dropped text on lurid fields of color and transparent image overlays. EEEGH.

Now it's clear as a bell. I've gotten used to computer graphic pages. And I understand (most of) the jargon. I've passed Geek101. My initial aversion to the form was a clinging to old perceptual habits. Like seeing abstract expressionism for the first time.. if that's possible any more. Scrolling frames in a downloading web page is an exercise in peripheral awareness. A new way to read. More like exploring in the woods than walking the high road.

Hypertext is the pivotal ingredient, of course.. at least from a linear perspective. Ideas are stung together like beads on a private thred, not handed to us in a package. Maybe too much has been made of the effects of hyperinfo. How it breaks the authoritarian discourse, makes everyman his own expert. I suspect this won't engender a fundamental transformation of the human intellect. The forces of order are equal to the urge for democratic chaos, and there will be authoritative hierarchies of web information soon enough. Witness Britannica and the WSJ's attempts to stake out the high ground by charging for it. If it's free, it can't be worth much, the old saw buzzes. If they really could deliver, the estab organs might be worth the cost. Like an expensive college education. There are times when I cry out for a single source.

Then I dive back into the stew, and discover stuff I'd never have encountered in the library. I suspect the chaos will continue in cyberspace, too. Rave on.

After a few months of surfing, you do get a meta sense of web information geography. And the process of hypermedia acclimation makes you rethink the whole knowledge thing. We suddenly have access to instantaneous planetary raw data. Of course it's a hodgepodge. Imagine how historians would feel if EVERY journal and scrap of paper from an era was still available. But all this stuff is being put up with a new kind of self-awareness. We all know it's hard to find our way around in this new space, and we're putting up signposts for each other. Individual voices acquire weight less by being final sources of primary data than by becoming gateways to integrated collections of info. The guy at the hub is more useful than the ultimate authority.

Now I do my searching for hub sites, indices, hotlists. If I'm shopping for a single bit of data, I'll try one of the search engines, but I don't expect to actually get the perfect hit. Unless I'm real lucky with my phrasing, and topic, there will simply be too many possibles.. most full of junk. My second approach is to climb down a tree, like Yahoo's, looking for the nested hierarchy my subject might be in, and seeking for the site with the most links to apt subject pages. Alternately I use the news sites. The best daily news sites have fast access and archival search engines that can provide articles with links for topics.

I'm still searching for the best press gateway. I'm looking for a couple of foreign pubs to give better perspective on US and international news. The great papers I've used in the past (IE The Guardian) have terrible clunky sites. Right now I'm using the CapeTown Independent as an overseas hub, because they tend to index articles in other pubs, something the Gray Lady of New York doesn't see fit to do. But the Times is a good gate for domestic smooze, along with the San Jose Mercury, and the San Francisco Chronicle. (Their daily mag is actually called The Gate.)

This stands my thinking on its head. I stopped reading the press out of disgust years ago, and wouldn't have dreamed of picking up a paper or magazine to chase some intellectual interest. But there it is. The news media are in the business of communication and creating info-connectivity is where the webolution is now at. The cyber editions, and their ancillary services, may resurrect the daily papers. Instead of telling you the official line on today's events, they may become the conduits for more democratic access to information. Whaddaya think, Mr. Chomsky?

I still have good nights and bad nights. Sometimes I get up from the puter tired and disgusted that I spent so much time for so little enlightenment. Other times I come away energized and excited, with just what I was looking for in hand, or something incredibly interesting in the bag. Meanwhile I've been indoctrinated into this new medium. Probably done my brain irreparable damage.

I think, or rethink, or doublethink..CLICK.. that our information universe is going to be reshaped by this new tool. To the degree that what we know is how we know it we are just learning how to think, rethink.. CLICK.. Ain't it grand to be out on the cresting wave? OOO...oop.. hang on... aaaaaa


Send me your hotlist, and I'll send mine.