INTERNET

This is a guided tour along, what I call, the Electric Midway. Others call it the Web or Internet. This tour is aimed at novices and beginners, nerds and students, the self-employed and African- Americans, like me, who may be curious and who haven't yet learned the ropes. I suppose, it won't be a grand Safari but rather a Disneyesque expedition. It is an exposé, not really intended to be a practical manual. "Won't you come into my parlour?" said the spider to the fly, "It's the loveliest little parlour you ever did spy." Surprisingly, despite its immaterial nature, the internet is a world filled with all the social divisions and laws and other distinct features that any world has. With "front" entrances and "side" entrances, with protocol and clubs, portals and passageways, passwords and "traffic" intersections. It has a hierarchy of lords and moguls all the way down to bankrupt peons and has-beens losers, all wrangling for dominance in the realm of Cyberspace. The language is pungent, spunky and racy. With terminology like bits and hits, harvesters, crawlers, ezines, codes, links, priority, domains, hosting, pyramid schemes, etc. Internet is one kind of animal. It preys on consumers. It is like big whales, that thrive on the "small shrimp." Even so, its businessmen must be, in my opinion, the embodiment of the GREAT AMERICAN SPIRIT. Like ring masters, their choice of words and verbal skills wake up intelligence and emotion. The internet provides a platform from which, people can communicate, sell and inform. I've never studied business or theories of economic systems, but I've learned a lot from the internet and the internet salesmen. It all begins with the mystique of the jargon. What is obvious (about electronic medium) is that a concept can always arrive in “good state,” at the other side, unlike in-the-flesh products. The internet is still a wild frontier (though, not for much longer) with few regulations, courts, guarantees and safeguards. Like a trail leading to abandoned gold mines, one might see the skeletons of many previous traveler scattered along the way: Pages that can no longer be accessed, "banner ads" blinked out, contact addresses, where mail is no longer deliverable. And one is struck by the ever increasing amount of pop-up "billboards" and other debris that might accompany you. Additionally, there are, perhaps, too many farmers and ad-hoc traffic cops on the internet, who know how to gain power over man and the forces of nature, beating down the spirit of every new, gentle and breathing thing, although, ironically, sensible, spiritual, creative and intellectual things are the most suitable for delivery in cyberspace. The problem, which is becoming ever more evident, is that the internet is steadily loosing its indifference. Indifference is what allows animals to populate forests, flowers to populate fields, birds to populate skies.… Indifference (read as "free," "informative" and "entertaining") allows email data banks to become populated. It builds up consumer confidence. But indifference can't thrive in an environment demanding ever increasing restrictions on self-expression and freedom and more and more emphasis on the making of profit by the already powerful rich. "Free" things on the internet now, for instance, are often attached to rubber bands and may snap back out of your possession after a few weeks. (Part of the reason for such drastic and exasperating tactics, understandably, is the vast but also limited amount of electronic space or memory to be rationed out to the, as yet, un-enumerated and potential consumers of the internet.) Now when people ask about it, I answer: "The internet is an evil place. A land, where no one, with common sense, ought to go. “ Like a dislodged, collective mind, it was was cut off from the mainland years ago and has been drifting out to sea, like an island unto itself, haunted by the ghosts of failed entrepreneurs, run by robots and with the goods of hundreds of thousands of minds, locked away inside its vaults. It's food for the intellect, that they are they are throwing overboard, like it's Boston tea, these days.... A tour through internet-wonderland would be incomplete without a trek through Yahoo Yukon. Of them, I can say, as it was once said to "Inanna" (of the Babylonian epic poem who, on her way to somewhere, made a detour into hell), "If you were on your way to an engagement, why did you stop by here, from where no man ever returns?" Approaching Yahoo, one sees drifting on the water, the flotsam of many shipwrecked souls. Yahoo breaks poor men's spirits. Yahoo will frustrate the penniless wanderer to the point of tears but might swoop down upon him suddenly, like a great eagle, offering some truly spectacular opportunity. It offers splendid opportunities, but not usually to the novice, non-purchasing, explorer. You have been reading an excerpt from the publication "INTERNET: A Quick Guide," a satire, published by La Di La Dah. This book is now available on the forum SEND A MESSAGE