Chapter thirteen 
The Web and Other Wonders
When this book finally comes out, I am sure to receive a dizzying burst of angry flames from people who don’t like my approach. With any luck, the good folks on alt.culture.internet will actually rise as one to condemn my efforts. “He spends all his damn time talking about E-mail and Usenet,” they will complain. “Why the hell doesn’t he talk more about anonymous file transfer protocol? What is he, some sort of thick-headed, untutored moron?”
Putting that last question aside for the moment, let me point out that “anonymous file transfer protocol” is simply impossible to say three times real fast. It is also, undeniably, a part of the Internet, as are Archie searches, Gopher servers, and telnet connectors to remote hosts. These tools are available, they are useful, but their operation tends to be technical. They are used most often by those people who must do research as part of their job or college education. In most cases, the use of ftp, Archie, Gopher, and the like requires patience and a distinct idea of what information is being sought.
So flame me if you must. I have telnetted to remote hosts, executed Archie searches, grazed through many a Gopher menu, and what I found was a zillion megabytes of information, most of it intended for highly computer-literate academics and software engineers. It is useful information, surely, but mostly to a select cadre of professionals.
The World Wide Web, however, is another story entirely. I promised in the first chapter not to dwell on predictions and prognostication, and though I lapsed a bit in the chapter just previous, I have pretty well kept to that pledge.
Now, though, let me look slightly forward to the World Wide Web. It is accessible right now, though only to Net users who have a sophisticated and usually more expensive Net connection called Slip or PPP, and access to a program such as Mosaic or Netscape; yet it is so utterly flashy, fun, and user-friendly that it is bound to catch on.
In computerese, the World Wide Web (or WWW) is known as a graphical interface. Graphical as in graphics, meaning pictures—photographs, even short snippets of jerky video, and big colorful typefaces. This, in and of itself, is an amazing revelation to anyone who has spent hours, days, weeks, and months staring at nothing but orange letters on a black screen. The World Wide Web, however, is also what is known as a browser. It has hypertext links.
Hypertext links?
Sounds like electronic sausage, and in a way, it is. Though the workings are fairly technical, the beauty of the World Wide Web is that it is not at all complicated to use. Just as somebody once suggested that the common man might do well to never witness how sausage is made, the common Web user would probably do best to ignore the complex code that drives a hypertext link. Just press the button, and watch it work.
How does it work?
Let’s say you are reading a short item on your computer screen, a discussion of aliens from outer space, and you are drawn to the question of whether these aliens are likely to have webbed feet. Let us pretend that this document has been made available to Web readers by researchers from some esteemed university in Sweden. When you run across the words “webbed feet” in the text, you notice that the words are highlighted in blue, so you use your mouse (the computer pointing device, not the rodent) to put the cursor arrow on “webbed feet,” and you click the mouse key. With absolutely no further effort on your part, a picture of green webbed feet appears on the screen, with the caption “What They Might Look Like.” You enjoy this picture for as long as you like, perhaps gather your young ones around the computer to see it as well, then go back to the text, and read further along that “Investigators at Louisiana State University’s Alien Lifeform Applied Research Lab have studied the alien landscape data and have mathematically determined that webbing is far more likely than a conventional sequestered toe configuration.” Fascinated by this, as anyone would be, you click on this portion of the text, and the World Wide Web software does all the work necessary to lift you out of the Swedish research document and into a separate document housed on a mainframe computer thousands of miles away, deep in bayou country, and your screen blinks again to reveal the original Louisiana State study on alien toe configuration. You read that document thoroughly, click a certain phrase, and you are then instantly linked to yet another document, this one from Duke University, a study suggesting that the aliens are not even green but blue, and look like little devils, and a portion of that document might mention Al Gore, the vice president, and his views on alien podiatry, and if you click his name your computer might jump again to a document housed on a computer in Washington, and maybe you will even get to see a picture of the veep in a suit and tie.
Well, I made that up so you could see how it all works, but the truth is I did find a picture of Al Gore on the World Wide Web, in fact I found it within two minutes. It was my very first day using the Web, so I initially went to a document explaining the World Wide Web itself, and in talking about the Information Superhighway, the document mentioned the vice president. I clicked on Al Gore’s name to see what would happen, and the photo shortly thereafter filled my screen. The VP was in his shirtsleeves, squinting into the sun, with just the hint of a smirk on his lips. Gore seemed pretty darn pleased with himself in that picture, and why not? He may very well go down in history as founder of the Information Superhighway, or at the very least as the guy who coined the name.
And by the way, I found webbed feet, too. Not on Al Gore, of course, but in a graphic and graphical hypertext document called the Interactive Frog Dissection Tutorial, made available to Web browsers everywhere by the University of Virginia. I read about frogs, about the various layers of a frog’s anatomy, and I saw many frog pictures, even a nice shot of the foot, which looked alien enough to me. In a section called Internal Organs I clicked on the word “spleen” and saw large close-up color photos of the spleen, with and without the liver folded back. This was more of the frog’s spleen than I really needed to see. And I watched a dissection in jerky, fuzzy computer video.
That was fun, but not fun enough, so I went next to a document (of a kind that Web people sometimes call “home pages”) titled “Gateway to Antarctica,” and found, in page upon page linked to other pages, all I ever wanted to know about the history of the frozen continent, about its geological formation, about the birds and ferns and seals, and after clicking a few times, I ended up in the Antarctica Gift Shop. Yes, really. “It is fair to say that Antarctica is the last great continent,” I read on my screen, “and, for most of us, it is beyond reach. But now, with items from this catalogue, we can all share in the wonders of Antarctica.”
Nothing is beyond reach, it seems, on the World Wide Web, but I passed on the I VISITED GONDAWANALAND T-shirts and went instead to the home page of the Department of the Interior’s U.S. Geological Survey, got bored within a hypersecond, then clicked over to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and found many Shoemaker-Levy comet impact photos and nothing at all about alien feet. I went next to the home page of the Missouri Botanical Garden to bone up on North American flora, then skipped up to Canada for something called Carasso’s Home Page (“Think of this not so much as a Web page as a cry for help,” it instructed) where I found links to various Web documents that could help me improve my bowling score, pass a drug test, learn to belly dance, and become rich by working part-time at home. And this home page even allowed me to view photos of Michael Jackson’s wedding to Elvis Presley’s daughter, and around then my head started to really hurt.
If you have ever oscillated your TV remote control back and forth between CNN Headline News and the Weather Channel while half-listening to NPR’s “All Things Considered” on the radio and simultaneously chatting on the phone with a guy named Tony and answering questions from your six-year-old daughter, you know how I was beginning to feel. My head was a balloon about to burst, because all the information in the world is a wonderful thing, but I can only use so much of it. I had finally achieved true overload.
So I stopped.
I reached over and turned off the machine.
I went outside in the bright sunshine and stared into the sky.
I looked for flying saucers.
None came, so I can’t tell you if alien feet are actually webbed, but the Internet is webbed quite nicely, thank you, and the Web goes World Wide.
The Web is just another doily, but this one actually weaves itself together. Though most home computers don’t yet have the hardware and software needed to make full use of the Web, and though actually receiving all these data-intensive pictures can be excruciatingly slow, you can count on the tech wizards to solve these problems eventually, and when they do, the World Wide Web may very well be the future of the Net.
The Web is a sort of cross between television and Usenet, you see, and as someone who has found himself addicted to both at various stages of his life, let me say right now that the World Wide Web is pure info-tainment.
Who needs five hundred channels of television when the WWW has thousands of channels up and running already? The Web makes your mouse nothing more than a high-tech remote control channel-changer, and really, what single technological innovation of the past twenty years has caught on bigger than the remote control?
“There is more day to dawn,” Thoreau notes near the end of Walden, and who am I to disagree? These electronic woods are only beginning to take shape, and there will be surprises, surely, along with the new growth. Wanting to hike a little further, curious to see just a bit more of the future forest, I contacted current Web users, asked them where they thought all of this was headed.
Web users tend to be younger, more hip to the trends, cynical and innovative at the same time, and the answers that streamed back ranged from “this new technology will someday save the world” to “it’s all coming to a crashing halt in about twelve months.”
The most thoughtful response came from Great Britain, from Christian Darkin, a twenty-six-year-old comedy scriptwriter, BBC radio reporter, and computer journalist. He uses the Web, he says, because he is “curious about everything,” and he predicts there will be plenty of changes down the road, changes none of us can foresee.
“I think the Web is part of a process of development which started with scent-marking our territories and picking fleas off each other,” Darkin writes. “The history of the human race from the very start has been about finding better and better ways to work together.” He traces our development from hunting groups, to tribes, to villages, to nations, and finally to on-line global communities. “It seems that this progression leads us inevitably towards ‘ultimate connectivity,’ the state of total communication between all humanity which world leaders, hippies, religions, and talk show hosts have been talking about since we learned to speak.”
I liked the sound of Darkin’s words but wondered if I was being misled by clever cybergibberish, the tangled mesh of jargon and futurespeak so common on the Internet. I wrote him back the next morning, my E-mail skimming across the Atlantic in mere seconds, and asked for clarification. Was “ultimate connectivity” just a buzz phrase, or did it mean something?
“Think about it,” Darkin responds. “One of our main drives as human beings is our curiosity. We need to learn. To explore. But we are limited in this by our physical bodies. I may want to learn about the furthest galaxies, I may have the mental capacity to understand the information I seek, but I cannot fly. I cannot see far enough, travel fast enough, or live long enough to gain the knowledge. So I build machines. Technology extends my senses, increases my strength. It allows me to narrow the gap between the potential of my mind, and the potential of my body.”
Communicating by computer, Darkin goes on to say, is just another technology to extend our senses, to transcend our bodies and experience what would otherwise be physically impossible. When we trade words between my home in the U.S. and his in Great Britain, we are leaving our bodies behind, meeting through other means.
“But,” he adds, “in order to communicate with you, my brain works my thoughts into words, then sends electrical signals into my muscles to move my fingers across the keyboard. Now, if I could somehow interrupt that flow of electrical signals from the brain, and send it to a computer, so that instead of controlling a real body in the real world, I was controlling a virtual body on the Internet, I could move, touch, hear, and see the electronic world just as I do the real one—effectively I would be there. There would be no limitations. I could have as many limbs as my mind could control. I could add on senses whenever I needed them.
“This is all quite beyond our current technology, of course, but not by so very far. It just requires better electronics, and a better understanding of neurology, and few would dispute the speed at which these fields are moving.”
Those fields are moving fast, as is the field of computer networking, and Darkin’s imagination is not exactly sluggish. He goes on just a little further—the future may be stranger yet.
“If I can become a part of the network,” he concludes, “use its functions as my muscles, and its databases as my memories, and other people around the globe can do the same, then it stands to reason that I could—with permission—share their memories, see the world through their eyes, borrow their skills, and they mine. That is what I mean when I use the phrase ‘ultimate connectivity.’ It may seem farfetched, but if minds can be connected in the same way as computers, and there is no reason to think that they cannot be, each part retaining its individuality but at the same time becoming part of an infinitely more powerful organism, then we will have reached the state that religion, art, politics, and evolution have been promising for centuries. That is, a species of one mind, understanding all, and seeing all.”
Time will tell, but it is an interesting vision, and Darkin is not the only one making predictions along these lines. Understanding all, and seeing all, may be somewhere in my future, in all of our futures, and that will be something indeed.
For the moment, though, I’m still trying to simply understand how my modem works, what exactly we are supposed to be discussing on the Usenet newsgroup alt.bitch.pork, who is going to regulate this Information Superhighway eventually, and whether they are just going to ruin it.
Oh, and one other thing. Do aliens actually have webbed feet?
Maybe someday the Internet can teach me that.