War of the World: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 14, 1996 by James Gardner

I WOULD have written this review sooner, but my computer broke down. I am not sure why it went dead, but since it did so just after I punched it, I would guess that there was some sort of connection. Why did I punch my computer? To punish it, of course. I had recently gotten on the Internet. After crawling -- not surfing -- along for about an hour and a half in search of some specific item of information, I had come just within reach of what I wanted when a stupid little screen display popped up and declared that Netscape, suffering from sensory overload, had had the cybernetic equivalent of a nervous breakdown. It was then that I punched my laptop.

In Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, Sherry Turkle presents us with a somewhat romanticized vision of the evolving interaction between computers and people. She notes that she has named her computer Miss Beautiful -- a sobriquet for her daughter -- and she tells of one of her students who named a computer program that organized her daily schedule after an ex-boyfriend ("I love to see him do my menial tasks"). To me such personification is totally alien, even if I confess to feeling a little sorry for having acted aggressively against a machine that had served me irreproachably for the past year. Though I refuse to personify my computer, however, I do spatialize it. That is, as I peer into the blue, lacustrine depths of the Windows program, with its delightful frieze of parti-colored icons along the top, I feel as if I were floating in a post-modern swimming pool somewhere on Ischia or Capri. In other words, I feel at home in my computer and I am comfortable and happy there.

Still, that does not qualify me as a "computer person," and I even take a little pride in not being one. This was one reason I had delayed for some time before subscribing to an Internet service. Another reason was that I failed to see what consequence this technology could possibly have for my life, why I really needed it. What finally convinced me to subscribe was the prospect of sending and receiving e-mail, not to mention a commercial in which Barry Farber seemed to suggest, if I understood him correctly, that I would essentially be able to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles from the intimacy of my bedroom.

I was soon undeceived. The first thing one notices about the Internet is that it has been vastly overrated. Though you will have heard of the Information Super-Highway, what awaits you is rather a high-tech single-lane dirt road where an excess of traffic has brought transportation almost to a standstill. Though you will also have heard about "surfing" the Internet, the gliding swiftness implied by that word will mean little to those who seem rather to limp or stumble than to surf. And to the extent that the surfing analogy has any validity, it is only in the sense that any moment a big wave -- as in more data than your fragile modem can handle --will overwhelm the whole contraption.

The second thing one notices is that the Internet is the subtlest thief of time. By making you wait for each parcel of data you want, it steals a minute here and four minutes there until, before you know it, two hours of your life are gone beyond recall. And during this period of waiting, because these deposits of time are so tiny, you are unable to engage in any other activity. Add to this the fact that, once you arrive at the site, you are apt to find a poorly written document whose loopy, time-consuming graphics are as appealing as public-access cable television in all its ranting, unedited profusion. There are many polished web sites, but most of these turn out to be little more than advertisements for providers of commercial goods and services, or they are documents provided by non-profit organizations. The idea that one can surf through the shelves of the public library may one day become a reality, but we are very far from that now.

The Internet works in two ways. By typing in a web address, you can go directly to a specific site that has information that you know you want. But to surf the Internet is different. This suggests going along for the ride and not quite knowing where you are going. You do this by typing in the name of the subject or person you want to research. A moment later, the search mechanism, in my case Netscape, applies its various inscrutable criteria to come up with the nearest matches to what you seek. Naturally I began by typing in my name to see how many people on the Internet had mentioned -- dare I hope it -- my articles or my book. Here I ran into one of the most common problems with the Internet. The searcher cannot give you the object itself, but only matches of greater or lesser probability and a synopsis of each site. Thus when I entered the name James Gardner, it told me that it had found 86,754 Jameses and 23,456 Gardners and then proceeded to give examples in which the two words occurred in the requisite proximity. Unfortunately my name is not an uncommon one, and so I had to get through several entomologists and chiropractors, two naval engineers and a masseur before finding any reference to myself.