The Essential Internet:
The Rise of Virtual Culture and the Emergence of
Electric Gaia
     By Michael Strangelove
     Publisher,
     The Internet Business Journal

This essay originally appeared in the October 1993 issue
of Online Access: The Internet Special Issue: Your
Guide to the Information Super Highway, guest edited by
Michael Strangelove. For information regarding this
special issue, contact 70324.343@compuserve.com


At the heart of the Internet phenomenon is not
terabytes and technology, but culture. The Internet is
really about the rise of not merely a new technology,
but a new culture, a global culture where time, space,
boarders, and even personal identity are radically
redefined. In a world obsessed with style and oppressed
by the fear of the other and the alienation of the
self, the Internet represents a return to the
fundamental dynamics of human existence: communication
and community.

What makes the Internet such a powerful catalyst for
change is the almost banal, but nonetheless real,
truism that we are living in the midst of the
Information Age. Everything critical to Western
civilization rests upon information. The creation,
legitimation and propagation of information informs and
directs all structures of modern existence: democracy,
religion, careers, personal identity, even our
sexuality depends upon the flow of information.
Information informs and creates us much in the same way
that DNA orchestrates the structure of life. One
infinitesimally small change to the DNA chain and the
results can be as dramatic as they are unpredictable.
So it is with the Internet. By gradually moving us away
from a paper-based society to an electronic-text based
society, by altering the way information flows and is
accessed, by massive participation in the Internet, the
"Net" stands to have an all encompassing impact on our
socially constructed and information-reliant realities.

What people do on the Internet, above all else, is
communicate. They exchange e-mail. They talk to each
other. They do the low ASCII dance. The result of this
exchange is an emerging Internet culture: a distinct
social phenomenon with identifiable members, heroes and
villains, rules, metaphors, values, shared history and
growing subcultures. One of the more prominent Internet
subcultures is the cyberpunk movement -- the spiritual
heirs of the flower child generation who challenge the
present on its own terms: information and the right to
freely access and share it among all peoples. It is a
beautiful twist of fate that the youth of the nineties
have named information as the key issue and see the
computer networks as the new battle ground for the
struggle to maintain democratic freedoms.

One of the earliest and most active users of computer
networks is the Native American community. A people
with a strong sense of community which have been
marginalized by society have found that the Internet is
a means to maintain a distinct identity and foster
community across vast distances. This should stand as
an indication of what the Internet is all about: not
high tech and hot machines, but communication,
community, and identity.

Until roughly three years ago, Internet culture was
largely rooted in the scientific, academic, military
and technical realms of the Western nations. But the
vast majority of Internet growth has occurred in the
past two years, resulting in an explosion of a great
diversity of user groups. Today, the commercial world
constitutes over 50% of the Internet and is the fastest
growing part of the Net. The research, government,
educational and defense community make up the remaining
50% of the Internet community. All this means that the
Internet is both a catalyst for change while at the
same time undergoing enormous transformation itself.

We can speak of the Internet as being in the process of
becoming both the ultimate tool of "Big Brother" and
the new hope of the dispossessed. We can be certain
that like the printing press, the Net will be used to
inform democratic action and politize a fragmented and
disempowered population. It will most certainly also be
used to manipulate the consumer and assist the giant
engines of dehumanizing beauracracy and big government.
As with the introduction of television and the rise of
mass culture, we stand ignorant before the uncertain
future of the massive forces presently at work.

Only a few decades after the invention of the Gutenberg
Press, there were fifty million books in Europe. The
result of this, for better and worse, was the Age of
Enlightenment and the rise of modern civilization.
Unlike the coming interactive cable TV systems, which
may only allow us to interact with our wallets and 500
channels of shit on TV, the Internet represents not
simply a new era of entertainment, but a new era of
communication and self publication. The era of
electronic pamphleteers has quietly begun.

With a computer, modem and an Internet connection,
every person has the potential to become a publisher, a
mass distributor of knowledge, information and
misinformation, fact, fancy and fiction. Never before
in history have so many people been able to communicate
so much to so many. The ability to communicate to mass
audiences has been the privilege of the elite -- now it
is within the grasp of the person on the street. How
governments and international corporations will attempt
to control this new power is uncertain, but such power
and freedom will certainly not escape the attention of
those "in control" for long. For now at least, the
Internet is the largest uncensored medium of
communication in history, and may indeed become the
last stand for free speech -- an otherwise historically
rare phenomenon.

Within the Internet a convergence is taking place that
will shake the foundations of the powerful. Free-Nets,
community telecomputing networks that provide urban
areas with free Internet e-mail accounts and access to
government information, are spreading across North
America. Before this millennium comes to a close, most
major urban areas in North America will be connected
through a global web of Free-Nets. These Free-Nets will
provide a new generation with their first experience of
e-mail and the Internet.

At the same time, state after state is beginning to
offer free Internet accounts to students and teachers.
Where I was taught to use a slide-rule, my children
will play and learn in the fields of the Internet. What
will happen when the Free-Net population erupts onto a
diverse and matured Internet culture is certain to be
as dramatic and far reaching as the invention of mass
printing. The dawn of the next century will reveal a
truly networked nation of citizens demanding greater
access to government information, elected officials,
and corporate decision makers. The convergence of the
children of silicon valley with the emergence of
Free-Nets and the larger Internet will redefine our
concept and experience of community, reshape our
relationship to information, see the triumph of content
over style, and forever change our perception of self,
time, space, and the Other in much the same way as
seeing the earth from outer space has irreversibly
changed the modern mind.

We are at one and the same time the children of Mother
Earth and the midwives of Electric Gaia. Our children
are destined to participate in a new form of global
consciousness that is the birthright of a people who
are in the process of defining themselves as one
community on one planet. Behind the technology, behind
the hidden dangers, behind tomorrow is this -- the
essential Internet.

Michael Strangelove (Mstrange@Fonorola.Net) 
is the founder of Strangelove Internet
Enterprises, an entreperneurial company that publishes
The Internet Business Journal and How to Advertise on
the Internet: An Introduction to Internet-Facilitated
Marketing.
See our Web site at
http://www.phoenix.ca/sie
for reviews, articles, and photos.


Using the Internet for Marketing: A Publisher's Secrets 

(This article by Michael Strangelove (mstrange@fonorola.net)
originally appeared in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing,
Volume 25, Number 4, July 1994, Hamish Cameron, Editor,
hcameron@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca).


All publishers should be looking seriously at the Internet 
as a means of marketing and distribution. Academic and 
scientific publishers not presently marketing on the 
Internet will need to explain why they are ignoring the most 
significant innovation in communication and dissemination 
since the Gutenberg press, particularly as it was the 
university community that was both mother and midwife to the 
Internet. Fortunately, it is now much easier to use the 
Internet as a means of both publishing and marketing than it 
is to explain why you are not doing so.

THE FACTS

For those readers who managed to escape noticing the 3000 or 
more articles about the Internet that appeared in North 
American newspapers in 1993, 
here follows a quick review of the 
basic facts surrounding the 'Net,' as it is affectionately 
know among the rising wired generation of electronic 
literati. (Get to know them, they are your next greatest 
market.) The Internet is a collection of 50,000 networks in 
sixty-five countries and is home to roughly 25 million 
users. One million new e-mail addicts join every month. No 
one owns it, no one controls it, and there are no official 
rules for using it -- just cultural norms. An Internet user 
has access to over ten terabytes of freely available 
information (equivalent to 20,000 copies of the Oxford 
English Dictionary). The Internet is the fastest-growing 
form of communication in history -- faster than television, 
radio, fax, or telephone. It is also the largest uncensored 
medium of communication in history. 
        If this is not enough to impress the technoweary, the 
Internet also marks the beginning of a new form of human 
behaviour -- mass participation in bi-directional mass 
media. When you put it all together, it is not hard to see 
why the Internet is in a position to have an unparalleled 
impact on global society. It is certainly able to sell a few 
more books and journals.

MARKETING PUBLICATIONS ONLINE

The basic strategy to marketing a journal online can be as 
simple as posting a table of contents and ordering 
information to the appropriate forums (called newsgroups and 
mailing lists). You can move on from here to building a 
simple text-based Gopher archive or a complete multimedia 
catalogue and online publication using Mosaic, a hypertext 
viewer developed by the National Center for Supercomputing 
Applications and the University of Illinois. The most 
efficient marketing strategy will involve disseminating 
information in low ASCII text (the lingua franca of the 
Net), providing a Gopher archive of value-added information, 
and eventually building multimedia online editions, sample 
copies, and magazines.

Post a Table of Contents

One effective marketing technique for books and journals is 
also the most uncomplicated:  create an announcement that 
describes the journal issue or book and post it to 
appropriate forums (Net jargon for sending an electronic 
mail message to a group of people). Do not post the 
announcement directly to individuals, as this constitutes 
unsolicited e-mail and will only gain you the wrath of the 
Internet community. Do not make your announcement longer 
than 100 lines; most people on the Net receive hundreds of 
e-mail messages a week (if not daily), and long postings are 
annoying and ineffective. Keep you messages short and 
indicate an e-mail address that the reader may contact for 
further information. For details on how to market to online 
conferences while respecting Internet culture, send e-mail 
to mstrange@fonorola.net and request the file Internet 
Advertising Frequently Asked Questions.
        Take the time to determine which online conferences are 
an appropriate audience for your contents announcement. This 
can be done with the help of the many Internet indexes and 
resource guides now available in print, such as The 
Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic 
Discussion Lists. A free copy of the latest version of Diane 
Kovacs's (dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu) Directory of Scholarly 
Electronic Discussion Lists can be retrieved by sending the 
mail message GET ACADLIST README to 
listserv@kentvm.kent.edu.

Create Your Own Forum

It is also possible to create your own online conference for 
disseminating  contents lists and selected articles. A few 
years ago I created an experimental electronic journal for 
the dissemination of contents lists and book summaries in 
the field of religious studies. The journal immediately 
attracted one thousand readers from thirty countries, and a 
few dozen publishers regularly contributed content and 
ordering information. Readers appreciated the free service 
and publishers informed me that it did indeed generate 
sales.
        If you want to create your own mailing list and are 
affiliated with a university, contact your computing and 
communication services and ask for the local Internet 
postmaster he or she will tell you what is possible at your 
own Internet site. Otherwise, the more than fifty Internet 
guides and manuals now available at the bookstore will 
launch you  in the more technical aspects of starting a 
mailing list. A personal favourite of mine is The Complete 
Idiot's Guide to the Internet  by Peter Kent (Alpha Books 
1994). 


Create an Online Archive

The next step in marketing publications on the Internet 
involves creating an archive of contents lists, free sample 
articles, and ordering information. This is done through a 
shareware program called Gopher. Gopher allows Internet 
users to browse through hierarchical menus, read articles 
online, and even retrieve sample articles or chapters to 
their own e-mail box. There are now more than 20,000 Gopher 
archives on the Internet. They are accessible by the vast 
majority of Internet users and are extremely easy to create 
and maintain. 
        There are services that will maintain your journal 
title on a Gopher archive and charge you an annual fee. One 
such service, the Electronic Newsstand, provides an Internet 
presence for more than eighty magazines. Publishers pay as 
much as $5000 annually to be 
included (a ridiculous price given the low costs and greater 
flexibility of getting your own Internet site in-house). The 
main problem with such services is that they fail to alert 
online conference members adequately to the existence of the 
passive archive.
        For those academic publishers who are working on a 
small budget, it is entirely possible to create an extensive 
Internet presence by taking advantage of the Internet's love 
of free information. Hundreds of universities maintain 
subject-oriented Gopher archives and are always looking for 
relevant information of quality to include in their 
collection. Part of your task of going online on a 
shoestring involves identifying Gopher archives that would 
be interested in housing your material and contacting the 
maintainer of the archive with a request to be included. 
        One such site that freely accepts journal contents 
lists and sample issues is the CICnet Archive of Electronic 
Journals and Newsletters (Gopher to gopher.cic.net) 
maintained by Paul Southworth (pauls@cic.net). This is the 
most comprehensive listing of journals available on the 
Internet, and it is a  good place in which to get a feel for 
the scope of Internet-facilitated publishing. The number of 
titles in this archive is quickly approaching one thousand. 
When I started documenting the growth of Internet-
facilitated journals and newsletters three years ago, there 
were only a few dozen titles on the Net.
        An excellent place to start your hunting for other 
potential archives (and otherwise useful sources of 
information) is the University of Michigan's Clearinghouse 
for Subject Oriented Internet Resource Guides (gopher to 
gopher.lib.umich.edu). This archive lists more than 130 
guides to information sources on the Internet, including a 
directory of online conferences of interest to publishers 
and editors maintained by Kara Robinson 
(krobinso@kentvm.kent.edu).

Self-Promote in Low ASCII

Once you have created a Gopher-accessible catalogue, the 
next step is to continue to send announcements to 
appropriate online conferences, informing members of new 
sample issues, articles, chapters, and table-of- content 
archives available on your Gopher. This follows the most 
basic principle of Internet-facilitated marketing -- the 
creation of an online presence by providing the Internet 
community with freely accessible information (your table of 
contents and samples archive) and informing Internet members 
of its availability in a non-obtrusive manner.
One publisher, Bernie Pobiak, founder of The Internet 
Bookstore, hires experienced Internet members to promote his 
titles in various online conferences. They do this by 
tactfully posting messages about the bookstore's offerings 
whenever appropriate (usually in response to someone's 
query, 'Where can I find out about ...'). I am sure it will 
not be long before marketers hire people to ask leading 
questions, and other people to answer these questions with 
skilfully written plugs. Carelessness and greed will spell 
disaster here for many. This strategy will certainly be 
extended to include hiring a third party to write a balanced 
but overall positive review of a title and to post the 
review to appropriate conferences.
        Creating an extensive Internet presence is of 
considerable value to academic and scientific publishers, as 
over half the Internet community belongs to academia (with 
the other half inhabited by the business community). If you 
are a publisher of library science titles, there are online
conferences that contain more than 3000 librarians. If you 
have computer science titles and textbooks, there are 
newsgroups with 30,000 computer scientists and students 
talking shop. The Internet is ideally suited to marketing 
highly targeted publications as it naturally gathers people 
into tightly focused interest groups. Reaching these niche 
markets is as simple as identifying appropriate forums, 
determining what can be acceptably posted to each forum, and 
providing the community with a freely accessible, value- 
added informational archive.

Create a Free E-Newsletter

If you have a large number of titles, another powerful 
marketing tool that will be of use is a free electronic 
newsletter. Hire a graduate student to write a regular 
electronic newsletter that reviews your books or journals 
and interviews authors. These free electronic loss leaders 
are very effective in leading potential customers to your 
commercial products.
        One example of a free e-newsletter that promotes a 
hard-copy magazine is BooKBraG, created by  Wendy Murray 
(BooKBraG-editor@scholastic.com). BooKBraG is a monthly 
newsletter 'about the best new children's books and the 
brightest ways to use them with children.' Its first issue 
features an interview with an author and, within each issue, 
the reviews are arranged by topic. The first issue features 
books 'about our nation's past by authors who don't idealize 
historical figures or gloss over past social injustices.' 
BooKBraG ends with a brief commercial for Instructor 
Magazine,  'the nation's leading magazine for elementary 
school teachers.' A 1-800 number is provided for the 
curious. 
        It is not hard to see how creating an informative 
newsletter and making it freely available over the Internet 
is a means for identifying an audience that will be 
interested in a commercial product or publication. This is 
without question the most effective form of Internet 
marketing, as it is non-obtrusive, adds value to the 
Internet community, and is easily implemented with a $30-a-
month Internet account. One such free e-newsletter, HOTT, 
attracted 35,000 Internet subscribers in a matter of a few 
weeks.

A WARNING: OBEY THE RULES OR SUFFER FRONTIER JUSTICE

This audience is remarkably easy to reach, even given the 
absolute restriction on using unsolicited e-mail. Those 
tempted to ignore the Internet's constraints against 
unsolicited e-mail will quickly end up in the company of the 
Phoenix-based lawyers who posted an unsolicted e-mail 
advertisement to 5000 newsgroups. The result was tens of 
thousands of e-mail hate letters, fax bombing,  and even 
death threats and obscene phone calls. On the cyberspace 
frontier there are always eager lynch mobs ready to defend 
their community in a fashion reminiscent of the best Sergio 
Leone western.

THE FUTURE OF INTERNET MARKETING: MOSAIC

Mosaic is the first truly successful multimedia Internet 
application. While at this early stage in the evolution of 
the Net only 2 to 5 per cent of the Internet community can 
access Mosaic owing to technical requirements, the NCSA 
Mosaic home page (starting point) is accessed by Internet 
users 1.3 million times a week. Every indication is that 
Mosiac and Mosaic-compatible browsers will be near universal 
in North America within three years. Mosaic allows publishes 
to create multimedia hypertext sample issues, catalogues, 
and storefronts. 
        If your target market is in the technical community, 
Mosaic is a natural vehichle for capturing an audience. 
Soon, it will be the best way of reaching the widest market. 
Already there are hundreds of Mosaic-accessible publications 
and Mosaic storefronts selling everything from homes to 
Carribean cruises. The key innovation with Mosaic is that it 
allows publishers to include full-colour advertisements in 
their online edition, with sound and video clips as well. 
This make it possible to generate income directly from 
advertisers while making sample copies or complete online 
editions freely available. Some titles currently producing 
Mosaic sample pages include Mother Jones,  the Federal 
Communications Law Journal, and USA Today.
        Mosaic allows publishers to produce richly formatted 
texts that overcome the limitations of Gopher and low ASCII. 
O'Reilly & Associates publishes one of the finest examples 
of Internet magazines, the Global Network Navigator (GNN). 
GNN is an exellent example of how a free Internet 
publication can generate revenue through selling 
advertisments that appear in the online edition. A screen 
capture of an article within GNN has an advertisement icon 
for a book, SendMail. 

O'Reilly & Associates also lead the way in using the 
Internet to market publications. They use the Internet to 
comunicate all aspects of their operations via e-mail. To 
contact O'Reilly & Associates via e-mail:

nuts@ora.com  For general questions and information
order@ora.com  To order books online, and for ordering 
questions
c atalog@ora.com  To receive a free copy of our 
magazine/catalog, "ora.com"
bookquestions@ora.com  If you have technical questions, or 
corrections, about book contents
proposals@ora.com  To submit book proposals
gopher@ora.com  If you have comments or suggestions about 
our online gopher service

The basic design of the GNN Mosaic magazine is bound to be 
widely imitated by other publishers. To retrieve further 
information about Mosaic, including the software itself, FTP 
to ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu.

CONCLUSION

In December 1967 the Star Trek  episode 'The Trouble with 
Tribbles' aired for the first time. That now classic episode 
opened with a scene that had Chief Engineer Scotty sitting 
at a computer terminal and looking at a full-colour image 
with text. Captain Kirk walked by and ask Scotty what he was 
doing. Scotty replied that he was 'just keeping up with the 
trade journals.' Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future 
included the networked dissemination of electronic 
publications. Twenty-five years later Constellation-class 
starships are nowhere in sight, but we do have the 
beginnings of the global dissemination of hypertext, 
hypermedia electronic journals, newsletters, and books. If 
you want to see the future of publishing, look to the 
Internet.
        Recently I was waging a losing war against some 
crabgrass on my front lawn when Reinhard Pummer walked by on 
his way to his office at the University of Ottawa. Professer 
Pummer has been using the Internet for a few years now to 
facilitate his work in Judaism and Eastern Religions. I 
dragged him up to my study and brought him on a tour of a 
Mosaic publication by the Library of Congress, The Scrolls 
from the Dead Sea. Using Mosaic,  
we looked at full-colour image of 
text fragments, coins, pottery, and hundreds of other 
artifacts and descriptive texts. The effect on the professor 
left me little doubt as to where the next generation of 
scholars will go to keep up with the trade journals. 



APPENDIX

Selected Publishers Using Mosaic

Addison-Wesley aw.com 
American Chemical Society infx.infor.COM
Artech House world.std.com
Greyden Press gopher.zip.com
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd  cln.etc.bc.ca
Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation 
hbscat.harvard.edu
Harvard University Press vine.harvard.edu
Johns Hopkins University Press jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu
Kluwer Academic Publishers world.std.com
Lehigh University Press ns3.cc.lehigh.edu
MIT Press gopher.mit.edu
O'Reilly & Associates ora.com
Prentice-Hall gopher.prenhall.com
Princeton University Press gopher.pupress.princeton.edu
Rutgers University Press info.rutgers.edu
SUNY Press uacsc2.albany.edu
TitleBank Internet Book Catalog infx.infor.com
University of Arizona Press lanka.ccit.arizona.edu
University of British Columbia Press gopher.ubc.ca
University of Chicago Press gopher.uchicago.edu
University of Minnesota Press joeboy.micro.umn.edu
University of Nebraska Press crcvms.unl.edu
Ventana Press gopher.internet.com

Peter Scott (scottp@herald.usask.ca) of the University of 
Manitoba maintains a collection of Gopher, Telnet, or WWW 
links to all the publishers' catalogues that he has found on 
the Internet. This collection is available at 
http://jester.usask.ca/~scottp/publish.html, but is 
unfortunately not accessible via Gopher (only by World Wide 
Web or Mosaic).

The Media List

Adam Gaffin (adamg@world.std.com) maintains a list of 
journals, newspapers, magazines, radio and television, and 
other media sources that have an Internet presence. To 
retrieve a copy of the latest version of this list, send the 
mail message INFO MEDIALIST to majordomo@world.std.com.

MICHAEL STRANGELOVE is publisher of both The Internet 
Business Journal and the Internet Advertising Review and 
author of the book How to Advertise on the Internet: An 
Introduction to Internet-Facilitated Marketing. He can be 
found on the Internet at mstrange@fonorola.net. 

*** FREE DOCUMENTS:

The Internet as Catalyst for a Paradigm Shift -- File PARADIGM
(Chapter 22 from the book, HOW TO ADVERTISE ON THE INTERNET)

Index of IBJ Volume 1:1-12 -- File INDEX

Advertising on the Internet FAQ -- File AD-FAQ

Directory of Internet Trainers and Consultants -- File TRAINERS

Directory of Internet Marketing and Advertising Agencies -- File MARKET

The Geography of Cyberspace -- File GEO
(An essay on the new type of self that is emerging from cyberspace, 
originally published in French in the European magazine, WAVE, 1994 #4)
 
To receive these helpful documents, simply send your request to
mstrange@fonorola.net and request the file name.

These files are also available via Gopher to fonorola.net
VIP -- Gopher to fonorola.net for the official IBJ Gopher archive.

_______________________
Copyright (C) 1994 Michael Strangelove. All Rights Reserved.


WWW Online Tutorials and Documents

There are many online tutorials available through the World-Wide 
Web (WWW). This section is a survey of some of them. As with any 
HTML documents, they can be loaded to the user's local drive and 
stored there for easy reference.

A Beginner's Guide to HTML
This guide is archived on a server at the National Center for 
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the original developers of 
Mosaic. It is an excellent place to start for newcommers to HTML, 
particularly since it comes from the developers of the most popular 
WWW browser.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demowab/html-primer.html
pubs@ncsa.uiuc.edu

HTML, the complete-ish guide
This guide is geared towards Xmosaic users, and includes information 
on advanced features, such as forms and equations. It also includes a 
few icons which can be incorporated into home pages to give them an 
attractive look and feel.
http://www.eeb.ele.tue.nl/misc/html_guide.html
sunil@uel.co.uk

HTML Documentation
http://www.utirc.utoronto.ca/HTMLdocs/NewHTML/htmlindex.html
This guide includes tips and information about writing good HTML 
documents, as well as information regarding the differences between 
HTML and HTML+.
Some of the material here is archived on an FTP server at the 
University of Toronto: ftp.utirc.utoronto.ca
Author: Ian Graham
igraham@utirc.utoronto.ca

Crash Course on writing documents for the Web
This document was written by Eamonn Sullivan, a technical editor 
with PC Week Labs. This is a good overview of HTML, and includes 
such topics as The Absolute Essentials and HTML Philosophy.
http://www.ziff.com/~eamonn/crash_course.html

Whatsupdoc HTML Tutorial
http://fire.clarkson.edu/doc/html/htut.html
This tutorial is layed out in a standard way that inroduces the codes 
more or less in the order in which you would use them in creating a 
home page. One feature of this tutorial is the embedded exercises 
which, when you click them, render a display which your own 
completed exercise is meant to resemble if done properly.
An extensive list of extended characters is included in this tutorial, 
such as foreign language accents and special characters.
For comments or help on this tutorial email 
horn@craft.camp.clarkson.edu.

Composing Good HTML
http://www.willamette.edu/html-composition/strict-html.html
This tutorial offers information not just on the tags and how to use 
them, but also suggestions on how to make your home page attractive 
and usable.
by James Tilton
jtilton@willamette.edu

ICONS FOR USE

Tony's Icons
This is a set of public domain from Tony Sanders. User may 
incorporate these icons in their home pages.
http://www.bsdi.com/icons/tonys.html
Tony Sanders is on the Net at sanders@bsdi.com

Anthony's Icon Library
http://server.berkeley.edu:80/pub//AIcons/appl/
FTP: server.berkeley.edu
Directory: /pub/AIcons/
This archive of Icons is maintained by Anthony Thyssen 
(anthony@cit.gu.edu.au). Most of the icons are freely available for 
use, although the archiver requests that users consult the readme file 
for those few exceptions.
This site has an extensive selection of icons, though naviging through 
it is hampered by the fact that the interface is based upon an FTP 
system, which is slightly less user-friendly that the WWW-based one.

Rutgers University Network Services WWW Icons and Logos
http://www-ns.rutgers.edu/doc-images/
This site has an extensive selection of icon and button graphics in GIF 
format. This site also has recommendations for using transparent GIF 
graphics on various platforms.

WRITING TOOLS & CONVERSION
Many users on the Internet have written macros and script files which 
convert text in a word processor, like WordPerfect for example, into 
HTML documents. There is a useful Home Page which has links to 
many of these scripts and converters.

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Tools/Filters.html


EDITORS
There are a variety of editors available online to help make the job of 
writing HTML documents easier. These editors automate the process 
of inserting the codes necessary for a WWW browser to read text as an 
HTML document. Some work as rudimentary word processors, saving 
documents as plain text. Others work as add-ons to popular word 
processors. One common method is the distribution of Templates for 
Microsoft Word, which has a set of styles which users can use to apply 
HTML tags to text.

WINDOWS

A good colletion of these editors, as well as reviews of them is 
maintained by Gabriel White (gabriel@werple.apana.org.au), at 
http://werple.mira.net.au/%7Egabriel/web/html/editors/. These editors 
can be retrived by the FTP address listed, or through Gabriel White's 
Review page.

The editors which Gabriel reviews are as follows. (We have not 
included the word processor add-ons, since they require a particular 
word processor, such as MS Word or WordPerfect, and so are less 
flexible.)

HoTMetal
Written by SoftQuad Inc. (info@sq.com)
FTP: gatekeeper.dec.com
Directory: /.3/net/infosys/NCSA/Web/html/hotmetal/Windows/

HTML Assistant
Written by Howard Harawitz (harawitz@fox.nstn.ns.ca)
FTP: gatekeeper.dec.com
Directory: /.3/net/infosys/NCSA/Web/html/Windows/

HTML Hyperedit
Written by Steve Hancock (s.hancock@icarus.curtin.edu.au)
FTP: info.curtin.edu.au
Directory: /pub/internet/windows/hyperedit/

HTML Writer
Written by Kris Nosack (html-writer@byu.edu)
FTP: lal.cs.byu.edu
Directory: /pub/www/tools/
or 
URL- http://wwf.et.byu.edu/~nosackk/html-writer/get_copy.html

HTMLed
Written by I-Net Training and Consulting Ltd. (inettc@nbnet.nb.ca)
FTP: pringle.mta.ca
Directory: /pub/HTMLed/

MACINTOSH
A good location for browsing Macintosh HTML tools is at the 
following URL. 
http://www.utirc.utoronto.ca/HTMLdocs/mac_tools.html

HTML.edit
Written by Equinox Development
FTP: ftp.oact.hq.nasa.gov
Directory: /tools/HTMLedit/

HTML Editor
Written by Rick Giles (rick.giles@acadiau.ca)
FTP: cs.dal.ca
Directory: /giles/


For Unix users, an archive of browser and HTML editor information 
and sources can be found at the following URL.
http://www.utirc.utoronto.ca/HTMLdocs/unix_tools.html

_______________________
Copyright (C) 1995 Michael Strangelove. All Rights Reserved.
The Geography of Consciousness:
Cyberspace and the Changing Landscape of the Self. 
By Michael Strangelove


(This brief essay appeared in translation 
in the new magazine, WAVE, the first 
European newsstand magazine about digital 
convergence, internetworking, and the 
emergence of cyberspace, published in Dutch 
and French in the Benelux and France. For 
more information, contact Michel Bauwens, 
editor in chief at Riverland Publications, 
40 Excelsior Ave, 1930 Zaventem, Belgium 
Tel: 32-2-721.54.54   fax 32-2-721.53.80  
michel.bauwens@dm.rs.ch).


If you want to see the future, or at least 
catch a glimpse of where the human animal is 
headed, you will need to turn your gaze 
toward the edges of society. Don't look to 
popular-prepackage-consumerized culture. 
Don't look to those who rule, those who 
lead, those who are elected or anointed. 
Don't look to the centre of our modern 
empires, for all you will see is the 
conservation of power, the institutionalized 
denial of the second law of thermodynamics, 
the inertia that comes with bloated 
conspicuous consumption.

If You Want To See The Future

If you want to see the future of culture and 
consciousness, look to the edges of human 
experience. Find the cracks where the 
boundaries of experience are extended. 
Cultural change begins like a crack in the 
wall of our ordered and highly structured 
existence. Sometimes the change is 
successful and survives long enough to 
generate a viable foundation for community. 
Sometimes a crack in our social existence 
grows into a force strong enough to drag all 
of reality through itself and on into an 
altogether different paradigm.  

For over fifteen years now, the Internet, 
and the larger world of cyberspace itself 
(the totality of non-spatial and non-
temporal electronic culture), have existed 
on the edge of dominate culture. Until as 
recently as last year, the Internet has 
remained invisible and beyond both the 
experience and scrutiny of the majority. 
Today, the Internet has permanently 
entrenched itself within the landscape of 
alternative culture, and has a steadily 
growing presence in the larger, more 
prevalent world of mundane reality. The 
Internet is, I believe, a cultural 
phenomenon that is destined to be the 
seedbed of a new form of consciousness and a 
new type of self -- the uncensored self. 

Geography and Consciousness

The Internet will have a dramatic effect on 
the cultures and individuals that interface 
with it due to the relationship between 
geography and consciousness. Both 
communities and individuals, cultures and 
psyches, are defined, to varying degrees, by 
the physical geography of their community 
and the physical shape of their bodies. The 
principal is simple: change the geography of 
existence and you change the nature of the 
self.

Now it is not every day that we see a 
massive shift in the foundation of our 
existence. This is simply because the 
majority of individuals live within a 
relatively stable and narrowly defined 
social geography. Excluding, for the moment, 
nomadic societies, it can be said that the 
further you go back in time, the more 
physical (and social) mobility decreased. As 
a result, cultural paradigm shifts where 
rare. In pre-industrial society, and for the 
vast bulk of the record of human 
civilization, the geography of existence was 
defined by a day's walk from one's village. 
This radius was the scope of the peasant's 
life. All else outside this familiar 
landscape was myth and danger.

Immigrants in Cyberspace

Six years away from the dawn of a new 
millennium, we are faced with nothing less 
than massive global immigration into 
cyberspace. One million new electronic 
citizens are initiated into its mysteries 
each and every month. By the year 2000, 
there may well be half a billion 
homesteaders on the virtual frontier. 
Cyberspace immigrants enter into a global, 
multicultural social context. A virtual, but 
nonetheless real, community where time and 
space are of little help in mapping presence 
and relationships.

The Geography of Cyberspace

What, then, are the characteristics of the 
geography of the Internet? Can we map the 
social landscape of cyberspace? Or at the 
very least, can we identify a prominent and 
stable point of reference from which a grid 
may be drawn? If so, then we will have 
gained a glimpse into the future state of 
the human animal -- a state I have named the 
uncensored self. 

It is the unique nature of Internet 
communication that provides us with a point 
of reference within the landscape of 
cyberspace. Internet-facilitated 
communication is an altogether new form of 
human behavior: uncensored and accessible 
(at least to the middle class), bi-
directional, mass communication. The 
*technology* of the Internet has enabled an 
entirely new *technique* of existence -- 
mass participation in bi-directional, 
uncensored, mass communication. 

This is critically significant when we 
realize that community is fundamentally 
based upon communication, and in cyberspace 
we have an entirely new form of 
communication. On this new form of 
communication a new culture is emerging. 
This new culture will be the birthing 
grounds of a new manifestation of the self. 
Communication, culture, and the self all 
hang in the same web. Any innovation within 
one element will have a direct and 
inevitable effect on the other elements of 
existence. 

The Democratization of Mass Communication

Consider that throughout history, mass 
communication has always been tightly 
controlled. In pre-industrial society, a 
crowd was always perceived of as a threat by 
the elite. In post-industrial society, the 
ruling elite have maintained almost total 
control over all vehicles of mass 
communication. As a result of the rise of 
cyber-communication, the controlling 
institutions of society have, for the first 
time in history, lost control over mass 
communication. From this point onward, every 
one wired to the Internet owns a printing 
press (and soon enough, a radio and TV 
station). The means of mass communication 
has been democratized. The state has lost 
control over the means of production and 
distribution of knowledge at the very point 
in time when we have entered into the 
digital Information Age.

The Resurrection of the Word

If you want to see the future, look toward 
the edge of the Information Age, look into 
cyberspace. When you have arrived there, 
listen to the multiplicity of voices. Watch 
for the appearance of those who become 
empowered through bypassing the gatekeepers 
of mass communication. Recall how the 
Gutenberg Press empowered a few critical 
thinkers to change the course of nations 
with their writings. How much time will pass 
before we stand witness to cyberspace 
writers who reengage the one constant 
historical force -- the power of uncensored 
communication, the authority of the 
compelling voice? The new technology of 
communication, the new geography of 
consciousness, the new technique of 
existence combine to form a linchpin on 
which the whole world is about to turn.


Michael Strangelove is the publisher of THE 
INTERNET BUSINESS JOURNAL and the author of 
HOW TO ADVERTISE ON THE INTERNET. Michael is 
currently working on a new book, THE 
UNCENSORED SELF: ESSAYS IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY 
OF CYBERSPACE. He can be reached at 
mstrange@fonorola.net.

Forthcoming articles about the Internet by 
Michael Strangelove will appear in ONLINE 
ACCESS (Immigrants in Cyberspace, Sept), THE 
JOURNAL OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING (Using the 
Internet for Marketing: A Publisher's 
Secrets, Fall), and WAVE (The End of 
Publishing).

Copyright (C) 1994, by Michael Strangelove.
All rights reserved. This essay may be archived
and reproduced in electronic form so long as
no fee is charged to the user. It may not be
reproduced in print without permission from
Michael Strangelove.