cover image Deeper: My Two Year Odyssey in Cyberspace

Deeper: My Two Year Odyssey in Cyberspace

John Seabrook. Simon & Schuster, $24.5 (288pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80175-9

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.)