AN odyssey in cyberspace? Our hero grapples with monstrous outpourings of crazed nerds and sails manfully between the Scylla of slow modems and the Charybdis of vast telephone bills.
John Seabrook himself sees his journey as "a Road to Illumination through the Land of Loss", following in the virtual footsteps of his great-grandaddy, the Klondike gold-prospector D.J. Toomey. D.J., we are lovingly informed (in email by the author's Mom), "would have wanted to learn about cyberspace too".
This epic journey begins in the shallow waters of a lengthy and stunningly boring correspondence between the author and Bill Gates (billgAmicrosoft.com). We learn lots about Bill that we don't really need to know - "My girlfriend and I just got new kayaks" - and we encounter, with some dismay, the author's penchant for stating the obvious at considerable length.
Seabrook concludes, rather belatedly, that billg and he don't have much to say to each other. One golden nugget in the dross (great-grandaddy would have approved) is an email from a total stranger to billg asking him to recommend a good restaurant in Seattle.
Leaving email behind with some regret ("I found myself wanting email from Bill"), the author is savagely "flamed" on the Net, i.e. attacked viciously in rude and angry words which cannot be repeated here. His attempts to douse these flames drive Seabrook deeper into the Net's recesses. He encounters strange Usenet newsgroups, devoted to paganism and bondage (separately); we are inexplicably given long lists of their contents, as even the author isn't really interested.
Seabrook is concerned by the wild and unruly nature of many of the newsgroups, with the "flaming" getting somewhat out of hand, especially in the Heavy Metal topics. He himself, however, forwards his flames (as well as his fan email) to his Mom, by now also online, and indulges in embarrassing sexual games in the chat rooms (don't ask).
Our cyberspace voyager rises to a position of influence, co-hosting the Books Conference on his favourite bulletin board, but we learn nothing of the possibly fascinating literary debates which he co-hosts.
He remains aloof from the underlying technology and doesn't even open his new book on HTML, the language in which World Wide Web (WWW) pages are written. Instead he retains a love of the old-fashioned print media: "We all worked in pencil, that marvellous tool, our heads bent over big, sumptuous sheets of paper, silently reading the columns of type. I admired the old, arcane symbols of the typesetter's art, remembering that this was how I met my wife."
The combination of lyricism and self-absorption is typical of the author, as is his capacity for anti-climax. Shortly after starting an all-too-rare discussion with a fellow "digital guy" on the implications of the new technology, the nerd factor intrudes: "Hey, you want to go back to the office and play Marathon?" And they do, unfortunately.
Two years in cyberspace and we are offered no insights, no conclusions. Seabrook admits that he never mastered the art of giving an exciting online tour to his friends. I "could feel my visitors' interest flagging".
The same fate awaits readers of his book. We could have had a serious meditation on the relationship between communities in cyberspace and communities IRL (in Real Life) or a humorous depiction of the wilder side of nerd culture.
What we get is an extended Home Page, one of those self-indulgent sites on the Web with useless personal information about the author. There's a real (so to speak) Seabrook Home Page on the Web which was typical of that gormless genre, but is now dedicated to selling this much-hyped book.