Deeper: Adventures on the Net

by John Seabrook

Overview

With a winning combination of bemusement, frustration, and affection, John Seabrook takes us along on his personal journey from "newbie" to old hand in cyberspace. Along the way, he sheds light on the history of the Internet and how it evolved from a geeky hobby into an important part of mainstream popular culture, and in engaging, often hilarious descriptions he de mystifies this new, ever-expanding world. For anyone thinking about getting on-line, for computer hacks interested in comparing notes, and even for nodrivers on the information highway, Deeper is a one-of-a-kind guidebook, at once informative, evocative, and beautifully written.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780684838731
Publisher:	Touchstone
Publication date:	02/19/1998
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Seabrook graduated from St. Andrew's School in 1976, Princeton University in 1981 and received an M.A. in English Literature from Oxford.

Editorial Reviews

Brian Eno What a relief and an enlightenment to read a book about the Internet which is neither naively utopian nor ignorantly Luddite.

James Coates Chicago Tribune Seabrook describes with vintage New Yorker wit and eloquence the landscape of the World Wide Web.

Kent Roberts The Dallas Morning News A very wise exploration of the Internet. Seabrook's is one of the first books to take the discussion beyond advocacy to a careful study of the realities, possibilities and ideologies of the Internet. Written brilliantly.... Great books about the idea of progress are great books about people. Seabrook has written one in Deeper.

From the Publisher

Cyberspace is trendy, but is it trendy enough to attract readers to a superficial if lightly amusing report like this one? Beginning with mundane electronic encounters with Bill Gates, Seabrook, a New Yorker staff writer, launches his Powerbook on an exploration of the Internet. He explores e-mail and receives a message from his mom: "If you don't come to Thaksgiving [sic] my heart will be broken." He investigates virtual communities, Usenet groups, flames, cybersex, the Web and other aspects of the online experience. Along the way, he evinces a smooth writing style and lively wit, but scarcely a whit of profundity. His discussion of "point-and-click thinking," for example, reveals the obvious: that the Web is not a linear medium, that surfing it via a mouse is more "mindful than watching MTV." Deeper, or at least fresher, ideas-e.g., that surfing the hyperlinked Web may induce paradigmatic addictive behavior and a light trance; that pointing and clicking compresses the everyday experience of space-time by substituting instantaneity for process-generally elude Seabrook. More a slick magazine article full of stale notions and blown up to book size than a book proper, this volume fails utterly to rival the important writings about cyberspace word-processed by Nicholas Negroponte, Donna Haraway, John Perry Barlow, Howard Rheingold and others. Shallower would be its proper title. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Seabrook, a staff writer for The New Yorker, explains the cyberspace phenomenon to old folksi.e., anyone over 20with this account of his virtual odyssey.

Library Journal

A chronicle of one writer's foray onto the Internet and his initiation into its eccentric, often hostile online community.

New Yorker staff writer Seabrook writes from the perspective of the cyber-virgin: He is the clueless newcomer, wrestling for the first time with the technical and social issues of the online world. Material first published in the New Yorker makes up the best part of this book: In one section Seabrook tells of an ongoing and revealing E-mail exchange with Microsoft honcho Bill Gates about his views on the Internet; another relates the author's experience of receiving a "flame"—a ribald insult sent via E-mail. Both are funny tales offering clever commentary on the Internet as a new mode of communication. But the rest of Deeper is only a meandering elaboration on this electronic coming-of-age story. We see Seabrook experimenting with cybersex (with his wife hovering over his shoulder), putting up a home page on the World Wide Web, and suffering professional criticism by other writers on the WELL, an online service heavily populated by journalists. We also get the by-now-familiar story of the Internet's creation and reports on the potential problem of online addiction. But the real flaw is Seabrook's misguided conceit: that the Internet is like an exotic country in which he is adventurously journeying and providing us with a Baedeker. If Seabrook's adventures were at all unusual, or had they occurred earlier in the Net's development, this tale would be more compelling. But everyone who ventures online gets flamed, and anyone with access to a computer can put up a home page.

Though the salted-in autobiographical details are endearing and Seabrook is an enthusiastic tour guide, he doesn't do anything on the Net that a reader couldn't duplicate in one good night on America Online.

Kirkus Reviews