NetWorld! What People Are Really Doing on the Internet and What It Means to You

Chapter 2: A Note to Visitors (and Natives)

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About This Book

The author surveys how the Internet reshapes everyday life, using reporting, interviews, and case studies to examine commercial ventures, online entertainment, the impact on publishing and libraries, legal and ethical questions about information access and censorship, and social uses of networks including matchmaking and community-building. Chapters progress from a broad overview of the network’s terrain to business practices, cultural experiments, the print-versus-digital debate, controversies over sensitive material, government policy and regulation, and the practical ways people connect online, balancing descriptive anecdotes with discussion of implications for individuals and institutions.

A Note to Visitors
(and Natives)

Everyone in NetWorld! is real, even me. Chapter 1 tells how to reach some good people who let their electronic addresses go on the Web site for this book.

In a few cases—most notably “Sue” and “Greg” in Chapter 7—I’ve guarded my subjects’ privacy with aliases and changes of identifying details. Asterisks show up after the first occurrences of their revised names.

Please note, too, that I’ve smoothed out people’s informal online prose to accommodate the printed page. A “smiley” on the Net is a good quick way to show a smile or frown; but I couldn’t think of anything uglier in print than a series of symbols such as :-). So even in quotes, I’ve used them sparingly.

I wish Mark Twain were alive and cruising the Internet at 28.8 kilobits per second; I’d love to see how he’d have handled net.dialect.

David Rothman,
rothman@clark.net
Alexandria, Virginia