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About Surfing On The Internet
Product Description Chronicling an insider's personal experiences on the Internet, a detailed journey offers insight into the language, rules, culture, colorful personalities, opportunities, and adventures that can be found. 30,000 first printing. From Publishers Weekly The information Superhighway's bright corporate future may or may not come, but the Net, shows Herz, already has a fully developed and wonderfully idiosyncratic culture. Herz here captures the grungy (if that can be said of the Net's ghostly text-based presence), junk-food and black-coffee, 24-hour-a-day reality of the Net. She describes the endless lines of text messages, the weird Star Wars-like virtual bar-at-the-end-of-the-universe sensibility of IRC real-time chat; the head-splitting fantasy game-like intricacies of Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs); the electronic cross-dressing (no one's "persona" can be taken seriously); and the curious-and sometimes poignant-personalities that haunt the Net's more obscure byways. There's hilarious stuff here: The Alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die newsgroup, dedicated to destroying the "purple pederast"; or Alt.alien.visitors and its loopy discussions of good and bad space aliens; or the "counter-intuitive" cyber-serenity of ZenMoo, the meditative site that rewards its users for logging on and doing nothing ("hair will grow on your palms if you keep typing," says the Moo program). By using numerous excerpts of screen text, the book is almost too effective at recreating the numbing, all-text look of the pre-World Wide Web Net. Indeed, most remarkable is the extraordinary amount of time ("12, 15, 20 hours a day") Herz and other hardcore cybernauts spend staring into the sickly glow of computer screens. Despite coming to question her own online habit, Herz, a staff member of Wired magazine, has written a brisk, funny and detailed homage to Net culture and conveys some measure of its addictive fascination. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal A 22-year-old Internet addict who has written for Esquire and the Miami Herald talks about life on the electronic frontier. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist In the avenues of the Internet, adventurers can find a plethora of fun but enigmatic discussion groups and games, each with its own cloistered customs and codes. It's a world seldom traveled, even by most seasoned network users, so Herz's book really provides vicarious thrills as well as insights into an electronic culture that remains on the margins of cyberspace. While a college student, Herz was initially attracted to "the Net" when she "barged into a cabal secretly plotting to torture, sodomize, maim, and kill Star Trek`s Ensign Wesley Crusher." Thereafter, she joined on-line discussions with cyberpunks and computer hackers and became involved in complex virtual reality, multiuser fantasy games. Although Herz quotes liberally from her E-mail, her book is more than just a hodgepodge of her interchanges. She has important insights about being a woman who lurks on the predominantly male (hormone dysfunctional teenage male, at that) networks. Even nonusers should find Surfing an endearingly brazen travelogue, and everyone should appreciate its useful glossary of the Net's frequently used acronyms. Aaron Cohen Review One night, Harvard grad student J.C. Herz headed out on the information highway, looking to waste time as much as looking for adventure. She was hooked; but she does manage to re-surface here long enough to tell the rest of us more PC-locked dwellers what she found. Cyberspace emerges as its own weird, raunchy, wonderful and terrible kind of culture as J.C. perceptively describes it through rather sardonic eyes and replays of her conversations with all variety of netheads. Being female is something she neither flaunts nor denies on the male-dominated Net, not out of fear of media-hyped "cyber-rape," but because of the annoying pick-up lines. (Although
