I now spend about as much time reading -- or perhaps "scrolling" is the proper term -- e-zines as I do reading printed magazines. I've become dependent on e- zines. I scarcely see how I got along in life before electronically subscribing to COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST. This compendium of unorthodox computer activities now seems to me a vital part of the mental armamentarium of every serious-minded adult. The same goes for RISKS DIGEST, that startling assemblage of bizarre engineering anecdotes from all over the planet, concerning "risks to the public in computers and related systems." Reading RISKS is wonderfully revelatory, much like having the Wizard of Oz invite you behind the curtain to confidentially bitch at length that the giant brass bowls of flame have given him emphysema.
It's easy to see the advantages of e-zines. First, subscriptions are free (if you discount the cost of the equipment, that is). Second, as long as you have room on your hard disk, e-zines are easy to store and don't wrinkle or rot. Third, with the proper software, you can word-search all the back issues at once. Fourth, you can give e-zines away to all and sundry at little or no cost and without losing your own copies.
The disadvantages, which are grave, take longer to dawn on you. First, since e-zines don't generate any revenue for the editor or staffers, they remain hobbyist activities. True, the perks of not-for-profit fanzine publication can be very considerable. Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer, the editors of CuD, have over 80,000 readers, the functional equivalent of a private intelligence network tirelessly investigating the global hacker scene. Jim Thomas and Gordon Meyer are heavy-duty smoffing cybergurus, but CUD nevertheless doesn't make any actual money. The publication is mostly written by its own readers, edited, collated and distributed by Thomas and Meyer. Since CuD lacks serious investigative resources, it can't carry out direct journalistic muckraking. Nor can CuD garner and compile useful statistics from original sources. It's even questionable whether any "e-zine" can depend on First Amendment protection, or on Constitutional freedom for its nonexistent "press."
The same operational difficulties apply to the somewhat more sober RISKS DIGEST. Although RISKS is backed by the venerable and respectable Association for Computing Machinery, it too is an edited compilation of comments from its readership. RISKS often reads more like a lettercol than a publication. And like letter columns everywhere, the reader-written e-zine tends to attract monomaniacs with an axe to grind.
E-zines are easy to store; but also easy to ignore. If you have received an e-zine and successfully stuffed it into a desktop folder somewhere, you somehow feel as if you've successfully dealt with it, whether you've actually read the words in it or not. You can always "get back to it later," although that "later" rarely comes. When you are wrapped in the utter immediacy of an electronic text, the very idea of a "past" is suspect. Instead, you save your mental energy for the deluge of incoming data still lurking there invisibly at the edge of the screen.
E-zines aren't magazines. If they *were* magazines, there would be no conceivable need for print magazines such as BOARDWATCH or INTERNET WORLD or MORPH'S OUTPOST ON THE DIGITAL FRONTIER, and yet print magazines about electronic networks seem to be expanding almost as quickly as the Internet itself. What's more, the print magazines are a lot more fun to read than most of the Internet is.
Word-searching electronic text is a very useful activity, but electronic sieves are peculiarly leaky. Keywording, grepping and such leads to an odd phenomenon: database blindness. If you look up, for instance, the term "toll fraud" on a computer system stuffed with back issues of COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST, you may come up with an enormous number of responses: say, 4,376 hits. This fantastic bounty of information makes you feel that you must surely have the whole phenomenon well in hand, and therefore need look no further. In point of fact, you can't even manage successfully to fully study the 4,376 electronic references you already have. After thrashing around a bit, you'll settle for a few pebbles off what seems to be a vast Newtonian ocean of information.
In reality, however, much vaster resources of untapped information still exist -- whole alternate oceans. There may, for instance be dozens of articles about the same activity which never use the term "toll fraud." Other sources may treat the subject matter from a radically different point of view. Mired in your instant and easy access, you may not ever see other sources, or even think to look for them.
Copying electronic text is a very simple matter. It's even simpler than copying software, and people feel far less compunction about copying text than they do about software piracy. In my opinion, no textual disclaimers about "site licenses" or "copyright" can stop people from swiftly cutting-and-pasting some bit of juicy gossip and electronically passing or faxing it to a friend. Even the armed might and omnipresent wiretaps of the KGB or the Romanian Securitate couldn't stop street gossip. Giving the reader the powers of editor, publisher and distributor turns all electronic text into potential street gossip.
This fog, this unstoppable miasma of info, may be bad news for tyrants -- or at least for tyrants of an older and creakier breed, anyhow. But no silver lining comes without a cloud. The confidentiality and accuracy of electronic text -- whether private e-mail or a general publication -- cannot be trusted. Even encrypting one's e-mail, a practice growing in popularity, won't stop the receiver from decrypting it, reading the plaintext, and *then* tampering with it and spreading the news to anyone he chooses. Expecting electronic text to retain its form and remain within a narrow channel is like trying to ink a fine line on a paper towel. Everything blots and spreads.
As a corollary, if you have a wide circle of acquaintance in cyberspace -- and a narrow circle of acquaintance isn't much use -- then you are likely to receive the same breaking news fifteen or twenty times through fifteen or twenty different sources. This is annoying. It also tends to overwhelm your native incredulity, for even the goofiest fifth-hand rumor no longer seems incredible if it's repeated fifteen times.
As it travels from hand to hand, electronic text can become corrupted. It's amazing, really, how little deliberate forgery goes on -- it would seem absurdly easy to invent horribly incriminating diatribes and pass them off as the work of others, and yet I've never known this to happen. However, a lot of "editing" of other people's electronic text does goes on, usually well-meant, but often destructive of context and sense.
Let's turn to the pressing peculiarities of online discussion groups and bulletin board systems. "Discussions" on bulletin board systems bear even less relation to actual conversation than e-zines do to actual magazines. I offer as evidence the puzzling fact that there has never been an online discussion of science fiction one tenth so enlightening and interesting as hanging out in the corner of Kate 'n' Damon's living room. In fact, I've never found an online "discussion" of science fiction that was even as tepidly interesting as the usual SFFWA suite at a regional convention. The closest the online world comes to a workable discussion of science fiction is the blather on GEnie, which is as paralyzingly tedious as the SFWA BULLETIN, *without the editing.* And while SF writers spawn like salmon out of regional writing scenes, I'm unaware of any who have emerged from an entirely online writers' circle. There may be some -- I've been expecting them for years -- but I've never seen any. I question whether it's possible.