**************************************************************
*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
*                                         *
*                                                            *
**************************************************************


A number of years ago I was trying to calm the fears of a 
parent who's child was interested in the net. He had heard 
stories about kidney stealing sex fiends who want to teach your 
kids to crack into Area 51's computers to steal the Roswell 
secret. I told him those cases were rare. The net is text 
based. That kids were willing to spend money to read was 
unquestionably a Good Thing. The net is a library card with a 
sugar coating. As a recent study suggests, as long as you keep 
your kids away from the music of the Spice Girls, they should 
do okay.

Fast forward to 1998. I take it all back. Random House, Western 
civilization's sole remaining publisher of books, has posted on 
its web site (www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100best) a poll 
of the century's 100 best novels. Actually, the site has two 
polls. One is the top 100 books selected by an esteemed panel 
of judges. Random House's panel included Arthur Schlesinger and 
Gore Vidal. Curiously, none of the judges placed William 
Shatner's Tek Lords in the top 100.

The same cannot be said for the reader's choice poll. Netizens 
were free to vote for their own favorites. Netizens slotted 
Captain Kirk in at 55. Readers actually placed Shatner above 
Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. Vidal and company 
put Joyce's Ulysses at number 1. Readers put Ayn Rand at number 
1. I can only assume Random House threw a vote Rand's way 
whenever some joker voted for Mein Kampf.

Are people stupid? Most certainly. But consider their reasoning 
for putting Shatner ahead of Joyce: Did Joyce ever publish a 
book that was turned into a TV series? Are there any web pages 
devoted to Joyce singing "Mr. Tambourine Man" (see 
www.fastlane.net/homepages/hattan)? Does Joyce have a building 
named after him on the McGill campus? One can see how netizens 
felt Shatner's place in literary history was in need of 
reconsideration.

The beauty of the net is we're no longer tied to media 
controlled by gatekeepers. Printing and broadcasting are such 
horribly expensive endeavors that it's not often we let 
Everyman have his say. He might only manage a mumbled "hi mom!" 
So, traditional media organizations tend to solicit the 
opinions of so-called experts.

Netizens can occasionally be surprising when the gatekeepers 
open the sluice. My friend Terry Brown, who's quite a bit 
smarter than me and normally gets a lot more bothered by 
civilization's decline, managed to find some comfort in the 
Random House poll. He was surprised to see the lesser known The 
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and William Gaddis' The 
Recognitions making the reader's choice cut.

A surprising move by a few netizens can sometimes turn into a 
full-blown movement. People Magazine (www.people.com), to 
promote its 50 Most Beautiful People issue, let netizens vote 
for the sexiest things on two legs. Leonardo DiCaprio, the 
early leader, found himself losing badly to a Howard Stern show 
character known as Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf. Netizens 
spread the word via email and newsgroups to go to the People 
site and vote for the dwarf. In the final tally, Hank polled 
230,169 votes; Leo could only muster 14,471 fans.

If you believe there's no such thing as bad publicity, People 
magazine did well. For a few weeks, adding another vote for ol' 
Hank was a popular morning ritual among programmers and 
engineers who wouldn't normally patronize the People site or 
read its banner ads. I can see People running a similar contest 
next year and selling a lot of ads for laptops and network 
servers instead of haircare products and home study courses in 
small engine repair.

If you believe even People magazine must be run by reasonably 
intelligent human beings, the poll helped serve notice that 
what plays to the masses in the real world doesn't necessarily 
play to the digerati. Lifeforms that buy magazines in grocery 
stores are not the beautiful people. They, however, honestly 
imagine a nose job and a new pair of track pants would easily 
land them in the bottom half of the list. People who are on the 
net are not the beautiful people either. They at least know 
they're ugly and don't need to be told how badly they lost out 
in the genetic lottery.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

               ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs)                   ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson)