After two years I gave up. E-mail from local bulletin board systems was consuming as much time as my regular printed mail, but my printed mail far outclassed anything I could find electronically. My printed mail was much denser and much more informative than anything available to me online, and my printed mail was arriving from all over the world. Electronic text was like a bowl of homemade soup, but what I required was exotic bouillon cubes shipped in from every corner of the compass.
I was writing quite a bit for online discussion groups, but the effort it took to do this well didn't seem to be well repaid. Printed fanzines and SF magazines offered a larger and more demographically varied audience than the computer enthusiasts on local boards. Time constraints, and the limits of the medium in the mid-80s, forced me off the net.
In 1990, a much larger and vastly more sophisticated Net returned with a vengeance and brusquely thrust its tentacles up through my floorboards. I found it necessary to get back up to speed in a hurry.
I have now been online steadily -- mostly on the WELL, CompuServe, and the Internet -- for three years. I've sampled many other systems -- GEnie, America Online, Delphi, dozens of local boards -- but WELL, CIS and Internet seem to best suit my particular interests and activities. I don't consider myself a netguru, because I've met some actual netgurus, and I know I'm certainly not one, because I don't program. But I enjoy the reputation of a minor netguru because I write for the Net and about the Net. The entire texture of my literary enterprise has been altered, probably permanently, by gopher, ftp, WAIS, World Wide Web, and global e-mail.
I now spend shocking amounts of time online. I used to carry out a wide literary correspondence through the mails. That activity is now near death, replaced by faxes and e-mail. I haven't written a personal letter in months that wasn't to some modem-deprived soul in Britain, Russia, Japan, or Mexico.
On-line, however, I'm very active. During 1993, I accumulated about half a megabyte of e-mail every week. Since the net-release of the electronic text of my nonfiction book HACKER CRACKDOWN, that rate has more than doubled. I'm getting thirty messages a day.
Most of my traffic, thankfully, is not personal e-mail but electronic magazines. I read a lot of fairly diffuse local discussion from the EFF-Austin board of directors emailing list, but I also read many online publications such as RISKS DIGEST, BITS & BYTES, COMPUTER UNDERGROUND DIGEST, EFFECTOR, PHRACK, and Arthur Kroker's CANADIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THEORY.
I spend a great deal of time grappling with these electronic magazines -- these "e-zines." I can't truthfully say I that actually "read" them. I certainly don't read them with the focussed attention that I devote to printed material such as BOARDWATCH or WORLD PRESS REVIEW or BOING BOING.
Of course, it's possible to leaf quickly through a print magazine, and most of the print magazines I receive: SCIENCE, NATURE, SECURITY MANAGEMENT -- receive just that kind of browsing, cursory treatment. But my relationship with electronic text is different -- not just cursory, but cursor-y. I question whether the antique term "reading" is properly applied to the consumption of electronic magazines. Traditionally, reading does not involve scrolling spasmodically down, and occasionally back up, through an endless piano-player roll of intangible verbiage. Electronic text lacks the ritual, sensual elements of print publication: back covers, front covers, typography, italics, convenient stopping places, an impending sense of completion -- what one might call the body language of the printed text. The loss of these sensory clues has subtle but profound effects on one's dealings with the text.
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.