| RULES OF THE NET: On-line Operating Instructions for Human Beings Thomas Mandel Gerard van der Leun New York: Hyperion, 1996 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 0-7868-8135-6 | 256pp. | SC | $12.00 | |
This is a marvelous book. Eclectic. Irreverent. Anarchic, yet respectful of the need for rules. Serious and humorous, well-reasoned and wildly parodical by turns. (Is "parodical" a word? It is now.)
Both authors are veterans of the on-line world many call cyberspace, and of the Internet specifically. Thomas Mandel was a futurist at Stanford Research Institute, and a prodigious contributor to The WELL from its early years. He died of lung cancer in 1995. Gerard van der Leun is a literary agent, a cyberspace consultant, and the on-line editor for Penthouse magazine. It is significant that they describe themselves as non-technical types. (It shows.)
One thing that stands out in this book is its authors' knowledge of culture. By this, I mean both high and popular culture. High culture includes (but is not limited to) the works of dead white male English poets and novelists. Popular culture includes (but is not limited to) dead American television shows. Thus, the reader will find that this book demonstrates a familiarity with Shakespeare and Shaquil O'Neal, Dr. Johnson and Mr. Ed, Boswell as well as Bosley. (Charlie, don't feel left out. You've got three Angels...) A number of characters from cyberspace put in an appearance as well.
If the book has a central theme, it is that of personal responsibility. Indeed, I think I can safely say that this is theme, meme and dream for the authors. It is a multi-faceted concept as they present it. A resident of cyberspace is advised to look out for his or her own interests: to be wary of "get rich quick" offers, to protect the privacy of messages they send (and to have tools for strong encryption at the ready), and to remember constantly that masks and illusions are SOP in the online world. Responsibility also has its communitarian aspect, including such precepts as respect for the opinions of others and care in expressing your own.
To foster the latter aspect of responsibility, the authors present an extensive list of rules (or commandments, or guidelines). Some of these relate to posting style: Don't quote excessively from posts you're answering, avoid writing in ALL CAPS, minimize the use of emoticons and acronyms. (Actually, WRT acronyms, the prohibition is absolute AFAIK. I disagree, for IMNSHO acronyms are useful if not overdone or obscure.) Emoticons are less useful, because they are harder to see and to interpret. They are a holdover from the Net's early days, when geekhood was in flower. Now, they seem to be dying out.
A brief, non-technical description and history of the Net is provided.
I don't mean to give the impression that this is a rulebook. It carefully avoids an overly officious stance. Some examples follow.
The Introduction leads off with
Welcome to the Machine. Or, as we say on the Net, "Hi!" Just to get it out of the way, the First and Last Rule of the Net is:
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The quatrain was penned by Howard Rheingold. A bit farther on, there is this:
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Because of this, control freaks — from the self-appointed Net Police to politicians on the local, state, national and global level — have determined to try and regulate Net behavior. In this attempt, they have decided that they need to make some rules with teeth in them. Rules on this level are called 'laws' and there are a lot of people laboring in the Command and Control Industries that say, "There oughta be some."
And so it goes. |
The Libertarian mind-set comes through loud and clear here. A contempt for government in general permeates the book. As you can imagine, one Senator James Exon and his 1996 "Communications Decency Act" come in for a special shellacking: "Senator Exon, white courtesy cliche phone, please. No clue salesmen will call." As Mandel and van der Leun correctly observe, the prevalence of porn on the Net was overstated and in any case it is hardly the only — or even the easiest — place to get it. In Chapter 3, Tools, not Rules, they make the important point that the way to protect children against "indecency" on-line is to give (that is, sell at a reasonable price) their parents the software to screen it out.
Other parts of the authors' stance are:
This last also permeates the book, but comes through most clearly in the appendices: The Geek Personality Test and The Annotated HappyNet. (I hope that, in years to come, when I speak of Leader Kibo on-line, He will be kind...) The description of how e-mail really works (pages 110-113) deserves mention; it is hilarious!
At bottom, I feel the book has considerable charm and makes considerable sense. But it is not perfect. I don't agree with all of its precepts. The authors seem to admire "having the last word" in a flame war; I prefer to walk away when I'm not getting through to the other fool. They advocate mail-bombing. And they sometimes contradict themselves.
Then there are some errors. On page 13, Usenet is described as having "over twelve thousand" newsgroups; later in the book, the number is said to be over 7,000. My best guess (made in late 1997) is between 24,000 and 33,000. (Although it's anyone's guess how many are carried by any given provider.) They mention the issue of server response time, but omit any discussion of traffic. And they assume that every Internet connection is charged on a per-minute basis. I would say these are indications of the authors' non-technical outlook.
But there are also literary errors. On page 52, the word "cupidity" is used, wrongly, to mean gullibility. I found no spelling mistakes, however — except in the perverse sense that a two-page parody of a cyberpunk's message contains neither "warez" nor "kewl". And, when comparing the levels of a typical flame war to U.S. "Defense Conditions" (DEFCONs), they get the order backward — calling DEFCON 1 the most relaxed condition. (Pages 180-183)
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