Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace - Hardcover

Seabrook, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684801752 ISBN 13: 9780684801759

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1997

Synopsis

In Deeper, John Seabrook, a staff writer for the New Yorker, takes us along his personal journey down the information highway. In the beginning of this pioneering adventure into cyberspace, our hero (seabrook) is a clueless newbie. He ends up an old hand, complete with arrow wounds to show off.
When Seabrook is not narrating his own on-line adventures, he is writing an eyewitness history of a tumultuous period in the early history of a new medium, when the Net moved decisively from a geeky hobby to a part of mainstream popular culture. We meet major figures in the computer industry, catch the utopian feeling, get flamed, get laid, soar over the Net like Satan soaring over the Earth in Paradise Lost, join a virtual community and find out what daily life is like, lose the utopian feeling, adapt to the World Wide Web, and build a Web site.

About this title

Review:

Deeper is a record of John Seabrook's wide-eyed romance, and eventual disillusionment, with the brave new world of cyberspace. Unlike most books on the topic, this one features little in the way of pontification: Seabrook is too busy absorbing the disappointments of online life, such as his first flame (which became the subject of a New Yorker article) and an abortive attempt at cybersex. This sane, funny, and charming book really does capture the lighter-than-air feeling one gets during an initial brush with new technology--and the morning-after feeling that follows.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A chronicle of one writer's foray onto the Internet and his initiation into its eccentric, often hostile online community. New Yorker staff writer Seabrook writes from the perspective of the cyber-virgin: He is the clueless newcomer, wrestling for the first time with the technical and social issues of the online world. Material first published in the New Yorker makes up the best part of this book: In one section Seabrook tells of an ongoing and revealing E-mail exchange with Microsoft honcho Bill Gates about his views on the Internet; another relates the author's experience of receiving a ``flame''--a ribald insult sent via E-mail. Both are funny tales offering clever commentary on the Internet as a new mode of communication. But the rest of Deeper is only a meandering elaboration on this electronic coming-of-age story. We see Seabrook experimenting with cybersex (with his wife hovering over his shoulder), putting up a home page on the World Wide Web, and suffering professional criticism by other writers on the WELL, an online service heavily populated by journalists. We also get the by-now-familiar story of the Internet's creation and reports on the potential problem of online addiction. But the real flaw is Seabrook's misguided conceit: that the Internet is like an exotic country in which he is adventurously journeying and providing us with a Baedeker. If Seabrook's adventures were at all unusual, or had they occurred earlier in the Net's development, this tale would be more compelling. But everyone who ventures online gets flamed, and anyone with access to a computer can put up a home page. Though the salted-in autobiographical details are endearing and Seabrook is an enthusiastic tour guide, he doesn't do anything on the Net that a reader couldn't duplicate in one good night on America Online. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0684801752
• ISBN 13: 9780684801759
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288