The Emperor's Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth about Internet Culture

The Emperor's Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth about Internet Culture. Dinty W. Moore. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1995. $17.95 hardback. Many of our grandparents now have e-mail accounts at America Online. Windows 95 has been hyped beyond any other commercial product in memory except Michael Jackson's History. Digital Emperor Gates was recently declared "the world's richest man" by Forbes magazine. Computers are now pulsing with colors and sounds that have made them seductive companions for classrooms, living rooms, airline seats. Electronic gurus like John Perry Barlow have declared that the Internet "is the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire" (quoted at 197). Has somebody been spiking our ether? Let me digress to remind you about the computer's trajectory through popular culture. Computers were giant and malevolent brains in films like Gog (1954), The Invisible Boy (1957), Alphaville (1965), and Logan's Run (1976). Dr Strangelove (1964) presented "The Doomsday Machine" as the ultimate world-destroying technology. 2001: Space Odyssey gave us Hal the Robot, who turned against its managers. Colossus: the Forbin Project ( 1970) portrays a maniacal, god-aspiring machine. But by 1977 (the year of Apple Computer's birth in a humble garage), Star Wars gave us the lovable R2D2 and C3PO. They have been followed by other huggable computers whose loyal service has expressed the populist dream of computer-empowered masses. (If you don't believe me, just get Microsoft's Cinemania CD-ROM and search for films about computers.) Dinty Moore-not a nom de plume and not named for the beef stew-and his friend Henry David Thoreau may be just the guides that many students of popular culture will need at this moment of electronic cultural ecstasy. Moore has been skeptically attentive to some of the millenarian fervor. But rather than giving us a Luddite rant with Thoreau as his tiny chorus, Moore has navigated the terrain of electronic space gently, sympathetically. He has taken a series of representative electronic domains and charted the features and native behaviors experientially. Moore's unstated rule is that he will not write about any Internet phenomenon that he has not directly experienced himself. This leads to awkward moments, as when Thoreau urges him to find a virtual partner and have some cybersex, but Moore dutifully performs and then reports the resulting sensation (disappointing), but also supplements his understanding by conversing with those who have sacrificed hours (and sometimes careers) to networked communication. Moore's chapters cover subjects such as electronic mail, community bulletin boards, spamming, flaming, MUSHes (Multi-User-SharedHallucinations) and MUDs (Multi-User-Dungeons), usenet groups, and the Newt-vaunted electronic democracy. …