The IBIC Guide to Books About the Internet

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Remarks from the IBIC Editor's Journal

b>April 15, 1995

I read an interesting collection of books about the Internet this past month:

Each of these books is by a well known Net.personality with considerable expertise in computing and strong skill as a writer; each was well publicized, with prominent advance notices in Publishers' Weekly and elsewhere; and each is concerned with the same basic theme: how fruitful is the time that we spend "being digital"?

Interestingly enough, the books fall into a rough generational and substantive hierarchy. Herz is a frequent user of Internet Relay Chat and MUDs, and the book draws heavily on her experiences spending an enormous amount of time using those channels to talk with other twenty-somethings about ... nothing much. Stoll is a Boomer who must be in his late 30s or early 40s, and he spends a great deal of time talking about how instead of reading Usenet News, we should be out experiencing reality directly--doing basic research, baking cookies, reading actual books. And Negroponte, who must be in his fifties or sixties, suggests that instead of spending time with low-quality tools, or getting frustrated with existing tools and retreating to the world of Tollhouse cookies, we should be thinking about entirely different ways to use computers.

Oddly enough, though, I found that none of these books on the theme of "how the Internet affects how we spend our time" had anywhere near the effect on my thinking on this theme as two other books I read recently that did not even mention the Internet.

One was Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi's THE EVOLVING SELF: A PSYCHOLOGY FOR THE THIRD MILLENIUM (HarperCollins, 1993), in which the noted psychologist discusses flow, "a rare state of consciousness that focuses the energies of those who experience it and helps lift them above everyday anxieties." THE EVOLVING SELF discusses how we might try to structure our lives so as to achieve a "unified flow experience". This is a deeply worthwhile book that had more to say to me about how I spend my time than any book I've ever read about the Internet. The moral? If you are concerned with the question of how the Internet affects your quality of life, don't read about the Internet; read about quality of life.

And about the same time as I finished reading this collection of Internet books, I was listening to the Four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in a books-on-tape version. It occurred to me that I've never found anything to improve on Matthew 7:20 as a guide to how you should spend your time:

"Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them."
December 25, 1994

From THE SPIDER by John Crompton (Nick Lyons Books), an idiosyncratic and highly conversational essay in natural history:

At Colophon in Lydia dwelt Idmon, a dyer in purple, and his daughter Arachne, a weaver of fine fabrics and tapestry. Supreme in her art above mortals she had the temerity to challenge Athene, the daughter of Zeus and the Goddess of Female Arts and Industries. Goddesses would appear to be as jealous and tempermental as film stars, for the perfection of the tapestry Arache wove so enraged Athene that she tore it to shreds. This preyed on the mind of the unhappy sempstress and she hanged herself. Smitten with remose (or pretending to be, for there still seems a certain amount of spite in what she did), Athene changed the rope from which the dead girl hung into a web, and the girl herself she changed into a spider, a creature surpassing all others in the art Arachne practised. That is why the family, or, to be scientifically precise, the class to which spiders belong, is called Arachnida.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in extending the metaphor of the Web. June 30, 1994

NET GUIDE: YOUR MAP TO THE SERVICES, INFORMATION, AND ENTERTAINMENT ON THE ELECTRONIC HIGHWAY, by Michael Wolff with Peter Rutten, Albert F. Bayers III and and Kelly Maloni (The Reference Press)

This is a reasonably good collection of pointers to electronic information resources in Cyberspace. The most distinctive feature of the book (and also its biggest flaw) is that it coverage includes the free Internet, the "mixed" world of dialup bulletin board systems, and all the commercial online information services--Compuserve, America Online, GEnie, Prodigy, BIX, Delphi. The result is broad coverage but a lot of redundant information.

Very few users are interested in subscribing to all the commercial online services. I'd say a much more typical scenario is the user who has free Internet access through work and subscribes to one or two commercial services at home, or who subscribes to one of the commercial services and takes added-value Internet access via that service. Such users would be better served by purchasing two books--a book specifically devoted to the free Internet world of WWW/gopher/ftp/Usenet, and a book describing a parti cular online service.

A spot inspection of the topical content of the NET GUIDE shows that the authors have done an acceptable but incomplete job of describing information resources for various topics. For example, the two pages devoted to Literature describe 23 resources, 11 of which are Internet resources. The list of Internet resources hits some of the high spots, but ignores a lot, too.. The user interested in Internet resource discovery on a particular topic would do better to learn how to use the standard Internet metain dexes such as the Whole Internet Catalog and CERN's WWW Subject Index, or topical indices such as my own Internet Book Information Center.

Conversely, the user interested in finding out more about the topical offerings of a particular commercial online system will find this book interesting but not sale-clinching. It is nice to know, e.g., that Compuserve has a Literary Forum, but a one-para graph description is not enough to persuade me to sign up for the commercial service. Again, the user interested in exploring the topical offerings of a particular commercial service would do better to sign up for the service and use its indexing system.

Conclusion: this book is a good try, and moderately useful to novice users, but the concept is fatally flawed. The proper approach to teaching new users how to use the dynamic environment of cyberspace is teach them how to do topical resource discovery on their own. This is especially true in an Internet environment where the number of Web information resources announced to NCSA What's New is doubling every three months.


Comments from IBIC Readers

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Editor's Recommendations, Summer 1996

In this inaugural edition of IBIC's Featured Books, I'd like to draw your attention to several titles which have helped to shape my life and thinking.

  • When I was around fifteen, I came across Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's science fiction novel, INFERNO. This '70s remake of Dante's classic describes science fiction writer Allen Carpentier's descent into Hell. It's still a very fresh, accessible take on the classic. What a great movie it would make!
  • The Niven/Pournelle INFERNO immediately inspired me to read the original Divine Comedy. I've read a number of translations over the years, but my favorite is the one by Dorothy Sayers (INFERNO; PURGATORY; PARADISE). The notes are excellent, and Sayers had such a knowledgeable and witty mind that reading her prose is a pleasure in itself. (For those interested in a more contemporary translation, I should mention that Robert Pinsky received excellent notices for his 1995 THE INFERNO OF DANTE : A NEW VERSE TRANSLATION; it's a very handsome book.)
  • I also want to tell you about the late Henry Fairlie's THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS TODAY, which probably did more than any other single book to galvanize me into a lifetime interest in Christianity that led me, eventually, to faith. Ironic, because Fairlie was a self-proclaimed agnostic socialist! But reading between the lines of this insightful and deeply feeling book, one realizes that the love of God cannot have been far from Fairlie's heart.
  • Finally, I should draw to your attention a more recent acquisition, the very handsome NIV STUDY BIBLE (10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) from Zondervan, indexed and bonded in leather in IBIC's theme color, burgundy (black and brown are also available). The notes to this Bible are amazing. They appear to provide you with a very substantial portion of what you need to know to have an intelligent layman's appreciation of the linguistic and historical issues involved in understanding Scripture.

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