Product Description

A skeptic by nature, a writer and teacher more at home with ballpoint pens than computer programs, Dinty W. Moore wanted to find out for himself if the much-touted Internet and the electronic culture it has spawned is really going to be the Next Big Thing, or whether it's the emperor's new clothes. This is not a how-to guide, a giddy net-head's online magical mystery tour, or a binaries-in-the-sky futurist treatise. Instead, this book tells it like it is about the Internet. Anyone who's asked, Who's there? What am I missing? and What is it all about? will find Moore's good-natured skepticism a welcome break from the explosion of wide-eyed techno-hype raging all around us. "Moore is far and away the best pure writer of the 'Wired School.' He's like the Stage Manager poking his head in around the set of 'Our Town.' Funny that it took the arrival of this commonsensical outsider to finally put a real human face on the digital world."--San Jose Mercury-News.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1608394 in Books
• Published on: 1995-01-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 219 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this skeptical look at the Internet, Moore, who teaches English at Penn State, attempts to cut through the jargonish flackery surrounding the Net to determine its basic virtues and drawbacks. Inspired by Thoreau's Walden, Moore sets out to spend a year in the "electronic woods." He visits the Usenet sector, a collection of "newsgroups," or virtual bulletin boards, where people can post messages on subjects of common interest; observes various MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), online role-playing games popular with college students; discusses political activism on the Net with a Washington bureaucrat and an Irish dissident; and bashfully dabbles in cyber-sex. Detached and decidedly unscientific, Moore illuminates the chasm between the high claims of the digerati and the misadventures of the novice Net user. His homespun approach and silly quips, however, make this a thin polemic.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Moore (English, Pennsylvania State Univ.) here provides a tour of the Internet for those folks who've somehow managed to avoid buying into the hype of online fulfillment. Although he doesn't launch into an anti-net diatribe a la Clifford Stoll (Silicon Snake Oil, LJ 3/1/95), Moore mischievously lays bare some revered 'net features such as MUSHs (multi-user shared hallucination, a type of role-playing game), digital relationships, and e-mail, and, in a hilarious encounter, he poses as a female and attempts to have cybersex. Still, Moore-whose given name is indeed Dinty-has some good things to say about virtual communities; it's just that-aside from anonymity, convenience, and the sheer number of people who make up these communities-they're not a whole lot different than what's outside our front doors. This well-written, humorous primer should find a comfortable home in most public libraries.
Mark Annichiarico, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"An unblinking, humorous look at today's internet." -- The Atlanta Journal

Is the Internet the future, or is it all an illusion? Moore provides a critical examination of the Internet's culture and issues, interviewing individuals operating at all levels of Internet interactions, from pleasure to business, to reveal facts and fallacies of Internet potentials. From sex to spirituality, this creates a fascinating interplay of ideas. -- Midwest Book Review

Customer Reviews

Intelligent look at Internet Community
The author captured an intelligent snapshot of internet culture and community as it began to take hold in the mid to late 1990s. A fun, easy read.

Definitely not a time waster
I enjoyed going back to 1994 and reading about the advent of some of our now routine virtual lives. Mr. Moore has a delightful way of telling a story, whether about Usenet (heavy in this book) or electronic mail, or the new thing called the World Wide Web. I think this is an excellent quick trip through "where we've been" and I highly recommend it to anyone who takes the internet seriously or as a career.

I wrote to Mr. Moore shortly after I read the book to see if he was planning a follow-up tome. He said he was not, but if he does, I'll be in line to buy it shortly after publication.

History with a sense of humor.

well-written, humorous Internet primer
From Library Journal: Moore mischeviously lays bare some revered 'net features such as MUSHS, digital relationships, and e-mail, and, in a hilarious encounter he poses as a female and attempts to have cybersex. Still Moore has some good things to say about virtual communities. This (is a) well-written, humorous primer.