My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 3 #5, August 1, 1997

HALF WIRED

I am never more conscious of being over the hill than when I receive each month's issue of Wired. I like the articles, but I have trouble reading them because they are printed on alternating neon green and orange backgrounds. The editors consider left-to-right printing in rectangular blocks to be unbearably old-fashioned, so they shape it in adorable little patterns and swirls. It all makes me feel a little green around the gills, and, well, old.

I find myself straddling two cultures these days. As a librarian I am an official member of the society of the middle-aged, middle-class, and values-ridden. As someone who runs four web sites, I have become a kind of unofficial computer geek, albeit one who knows next to nothing about how the machines work.

And there are things I really like about "geek culture." I think it's neat that people who come up with wonderful new ideas and images and software put them out for free on the net, for anybody to use. Librarians, of course, are the ultimate share-your-toys people, so I'm now doing all my bibliographies and how-to-do-it sheets in html format and linking them in to my web pages, so that anybody can use them, not just the students and faculty on my own campus.

Interactivity is another part of the geek ethos I really like--no read-only memory welcome here. When I first started doing this column, my idea was that I was writing these perfect little polished essays, and that they were complete in and of themselves. But as my readers started clicking on my e-mail address and writing me, I realized that what I had really done was begin a conversation, and what my readers had to say was at least as interesting as my ideas--which grew and changed as I listened to you.

Some people are scared of the net because it's too wide open, too uncontrollable. But I must have a closet anarchist hiding out inside of me, because I love the way any and all ideas carom off each other in cyberspace, and the way people borrow bits and pieces of each other's thought and build entirely new thoughts together. Are there ideas out there I find repellent and scary? You bet. And are there people showing us lots better ways to run a country there? Yes, indeed, that too.

What a concept! It's a pamphleteer's paradise. It's all stuff our students can use, except that I don't have to pay for it, select it, catalog it, and figure out a way to fit it on our shelves.

But we don't have to take anybody's word for it, because the evidence is there on the net too. Our stodgy old governments have gotten with the program in a big way, putting out all their laws and court decisions and statistics and consumer information online. City governments have put everything from salaries of public employees to city council minutes online. Universities and libraries and museums have filled the net with manuscripts and art works and children's literature. Scientists have filled the net with frog population counts and Hubble telescope pictures and Martian rocks and bird migration data.

And it's all free. All you have to do is learn how to find it when you want it.

Now, when I say free, I'm not just talking about money. I also mean free as in, nobody's in charge. Governments and corporations (but I repeat myself) can say, "No! That's secret! That's dangerous knowledge!" Or, for that matter, "That's MY information!"

Now, geeks don't like being told what they can and can't do, and they fight back. The government can close down one site, like they closed down Steve Jackson's game business. But he sued the government and won. The Brown and Williamson people sued to keep their corporate memos private, and they lost. You can find those memoes on the web, ready to be used in lawsuits against the tobacco industry. Other sites just get moved to a new location, like the lyric server that moved to China.

When your job involves finding information for people, you can't NOT love the net. You can't NOT be kind of sympathetic with the geek belief that "information wants to be free," even when you know it really means THEY want THEIR information free.

Still, there are some things about the geeks I find damned annoying. Flashy hipness is even more common on the net than in magazines, and it can seriously get in the way of delivering content. The thing about web designers is that they love doing nifty things just because they CAN do them. They love technical challenges. Can we make a line of print bounce up and down on the screen? Wow, let's do it! Can we do this in two frames? Neat! Now, how about three frames? Four? How about op-art backgrounds? Zowie! Let's go for it!

If there is one fundamental difference between print on a page and print on a screen, it is that print on a page is linear. It stays put, so you can go back and examine it again. It advances an idea from point A to point B to point C, and the ideas, and evidence, are controlled entirely by the person who put them there. The message of the structure is: This is my argument; follow it to the end and see if it makes sense to you.

Print in cyberspace, however, is a lot more free-wheeling. For one thing, large blocks of text on a screen are forbiddingly hard to read. So web designers make the paragraphs shorter, the columns narrower. Of course then it's hard to resist the temptation to throw some nifty graphics into those blank spaces beside the columns. And then, since you CAN do hypertext links, you probably WILL do hypertext links, which invites your readers to read a paragraph here and there, then bounce off to somebody else's paragraphs on another page altogether. The message of this structure is: build your own argument, using a bit from me, a bit from somebody else, and try to make sense of it all yourself.

As many of you know, I've been a fan of Jon Katz's column in the Netizen for a long time. But its new format, in a new magazine (or is it a column?) called Synapse, is geek culture at its worst. Read one paragraph, then click if you want more. (I felt like a lab rat butting my head against a button for every single pellet of food. ) Worse yet, read one paragraph and immediately click to tell Jon what you think! The message of this structure is: please give me your totally uninformed opinion (or rather feelings) about what I haven't finished saying yet.

This isn't sane, you know? It's like telling Valley Girls we want their deep feelings about what to do in Bosnia, and then acting on them. This is not discourse but democracy gone berserk--all feelings or opinions, knowledgeable or not, have equal weight.

Do the techies who create this mess even know that's what they're saying? I don't think so. I am guessing they do these things because they enjoy showing off the glitzy effects. You see, the geeks have gotten into the movie business too. Nowadays, it's hard to make a movie for less than $60 million (at least if you want kids to go to it) because they have to have really splashy special effects. And what was good enough for Jurassic Park won't be good enough for The Lost World--you have to come up with something even bigger and better.

Far be it from me to deny that special effects are fun, and some of them are incredibly beautiful. I loved the planet Jim Henson and Brian Froude created from scratch in The Dark Crystal. And I like scary dinosaurs as well as anyone. But all those special effects cost a lot of money. Which means:

1. the studios don't want to bankroll a movie unless they have some kind of guarantee of getting their money back (which is why we have Halloween to the 19th power--brand name film-making); and
2. money spent here is money NOT spent on a good story, intelligible plot lines, character development, witty dialogue; and
3. the pleasures of small and subtle can't possibly compete--Citizen Kane could not get made today unless Orson Welles personally raised the money from all those wine commercials, and even then he couldn't get it shown in theatres. (He'd also have to come back from the dead.)

So I guess my reaction to geek culture is entirely appropriate--I'll take a hunk of it here, a hunk of it there, just the bits I like, and mix them with my print culture of logical reasoned argument.

At least, as long as there still is a print culture.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.