You are either on the Net or off.
John Perry Barlow gives eleven reasons to jack into the Net, and eleven reasons not to.
- It allows you to meet interesting people from all over the world. Net.Plus: Did you ever have a pen pal when you were a kid? Now you can have thousands of them.
Net.Minus: Imagine the hit your productivity will take as you try to maintain an active correspondence with all these disembodied souls. 2. No matter where your body may be, your mind can always be found online. Net.Plus: Your physical self is a frenetically moving target. No one can get you on the phone anymore. But they can always send you e-mail.
Net.Minus: Maybe you'd like to disappear for a little bit. Maybe you don't want the world tugging at your sleeve. 3. You can commute to work at the speed of light, earning big dollars at home. Net.Plus: Why spend a couple of hours every day driving to and from your terminal. Put a terminal in the rumpus room and stay home.
Net.Minus: Imagine how it feels to get through an entire day at work without ever getting dressed. Isn't the life of a Knowledge Worker bleak enough already? 4. It provides access to all the world's written knowledge with a few keystrokes. Net.Plus: Thanks to Net-roaming "agents," burgeoning ftp archives, and vast commercial databases, it is now possible to retrieve any material that can be stored electronically.
Net.Minus: It might take quite a few keystrokes. The interfaces are savage. Keyword searches give you too little or way too much. Cyberspace is an infinite bramble of white noise. 5. You can conduct passionate long-distance love affairs in email. Net.Plus: The art of the billet doux has been in steep decline since the invention of the telephone. Bodice-bursting correspondence is making a major come-back. Talk about safe sex.
Net.Minus: Love is about bodies. In their absence, imagination fills in the blanks, usually incorrectly. Without emotional inertia, obsessive relationships are inevitable. 6. The Net eliminates such barriers as race, gender, attractiveness, or social grace. Net.Plus: Many social ills arise from perceptions of difference based on physical characteristics. In cyberspace, everyone's body is the same - nobody has one.
Net.Minus: Difference is not the only thing we communicate with our bodies. Words alone, without body language or physically conveyed cultural information, are often wildly misleading. 7. It helps keep you and your teen-age kids off the streets. Net.Plus: While you might otherwise be wasting your time out looking for trouble, online interaction can satisfy many of these impulses at home.
Net.Minus: Here, at worst, you're likely to have some well-understood interaction with Officer O'Reilly. Online you can find yourself in trouble with the Secret Service, NSA, and FBI. 8. It's interactive and therefore less addictive than television. Net.Plus: Television happens to you. In the online environment, you are happening too. You can do a lot more exploring with a keyboard than a TV clicker.
Net.Minus: What - sunrise already? "Connection addiction" is common, if poorly understood. Some of the afflicted log in as many as 70 hours a week. 9. You'll rediscover the community lacking in your physical world. Net.Plus: Virtual communities are springing up all over cyberspace. They provide their "residents" a sense of belonging and human connection.
Net.Minus: As Bruce Sterling says, "It ain't no Amish barn raising in there. . . ." A virtual community is like highly processed food. Critical nutrients are missing. 10. No matter how obscure your interests, you can always find someone who wants to talk. Net.Plus: There's an online conference for everyone, ranging from, say, the global participants in alt.sex.bondage to Latter Day Saints comparing notes on genealogy.
Net.Minus: And talk. And talk. And talk. Many conferences generate a megabyte of new commentary each week. The only way to separate signal from noise is to read it all. 11. Terabytes of software are available online, either free or dirt cheap. Net.Plus: Bulletin boards, commercial online services, and Internet ftp archives bulge with freeware and shareware programs, some of which are as good as the commercial equivalent.
Net.Minus: You get what you pay for. And the connect time fees for downloading "free" software can be steep. And much of it, written by beginners, is toxic with weird code. Or viruses.
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