Then why do people do it?
Have you ever been fishing?
Some people fish for fun, some for sport, some for sustenance, some for livelihood. Some just plain don't like fish. In any event, each situation requires different strategies and yields a variety of experiences.
The recreational 'netter, who's trolling the 5,000 gopher servers, may be looking for surprise, and is guaranteed to encounter the unexpected, as link upon link leads from site to site spanning nations and continents connected only by the "community of interest" that offers up tidbits on a particular subject. By contrast, the doctoral student or researcher has a stake in locating focused, top quality information that furthers her/his understanding in order to add to the existing body of knowledge. The blank screens and "could not connect" messages that the "troller" accepted with the ease of one playing a maze game can be quite a different dead end for someone whose job depends upon immediate results.
Perhaps yet another step into metaphor will help scale the scene. Although people have become used to the expression "navigating the Internet", many of us take for granted the experiences that "navigating" required before the ubiquity of airports, cruise ships and highways. In early times, your survival depended upon preparation, respect for the power of the elements into which you'd intrude as a transient guest, and knowledge of handling your craft in unexpected situations. Further, as Ahab found out, you'd better know the nature of your quarry, and what to do with what you found if you intended to return to home port.
Thor Heyderhal's recreations in Kon Tiki of the bravery, skill and knowledge of ancient Polynesian seafarers connects us in awe with the achievements required to traverse the Pacific in an outrigger powered by wind, guided by stars, over thousands of miles of uncharted oceans. Even with steel hulls, powerful engines, radar, lifeboats, survival suits, satellite weather, rescue homing beacons, and helicopters, we see that time, seas, tides and currents claim their share of human lives to this day. The power of the sea has never been "mastered" by humankind, nor is its mystery likely to succumb to our puny understanding. We just routinely do things that would have been unimaginable only a few generations ago. So too, with the Internet.
You may rest assured of your physical safety, although those with high blood pressure are advised to leave enough lead time for projects with sensitive deadlines. As we embark, we need to evaluate our craft, its capabilities and our strategies for a successful voyage.
Day Sailors
If you are interested in finding out what's out there, consider yourself a day sailor (and a fair weather one at that!). Your concern is following your fancy, throwing back most of what you catch, and perhaps wanting to bring something back to use later or to show those left on the shore. A simple PC or Mac will let you do this using almost any level of Internet connectivity, from dialup account with a command line interface to commercial online service with "point and click" ease, all the way up to direct connection.
At the low end, you can use the screen capture facility available on most software and services to keep a log of what you find, saving it to disk for later, closer examination or printing. NCSA Telnet, for example, has a "Capture Session" option that you can toggle off and on during your Internet sessions.
At the high end, client software running on your machine will permit automatic downloading from the Internet directly to your hard drive, often accomplishing any needed translation, decoding or processing by an intermediary program, such as a graphics viewer or compression expander. (TurboGopher allows you to configure your software to automatically start up such "helper applications" and even provides a means of obtaining this public domain or shareware software the first time you connect.)
You'll be cruising on the crest of seas of "pointers", left by the operators of the information servers you're visiting to lead you to other relevant "places" on the Internet as you either dive deeper or decide to pull up anchor and try another spot. The only danger you face is the tendency for your time to disappear down the whirlpool of concentration, which can either leave you late for supper, or broke (if you're paying by the minute on a commercial service).
The characteristic of this level of play is basically one to one: your query returns a single answer, which you handle as a single file. You will have to decide what to do with what you encounter on a file by file basis (read, mail, save, print?).
Sport Fishers
The "serious sports fisher" has a more focused intention, and comes prepared. While an entire afternoon may be devoted to the relaxing pastime of casting out and reeling in, without the pressure of a required catch, somewhere nearby there may be a tackle box and perhaps even bait. Choices have been made in advance, depending upon time of day (when are they most likely to bite), lure (what's most likely to entice a response), and quarry (different strategies and equipment are required for catfish, trout or tuna) and habitat (fresh water or salt will put you in different places). Your previous experiences may be solitary or may include conversations with friends and peers regarding what's worked for them. The primary differences of purpose and preparation yield a result that varies qualitatively from that of the "day sailor".
Internetters who resemble the "sports fisher" in their approach will pay as much attention to the "tell tales" as the fish. Certain programs, like TurboGopher, make it simple to place a "bookmark" in order to return to a "successful spot" at some time in the future. These programs also simplify the finding and catching part of the sport. A powerful search tool called Veronica allows you to search the Internet by keyword, so that one "cast" may set in motion hundreds of "lures", each returning a bite if you're fortunate. You can then scan the first 32K of any text file that comes back before deciding whether to keep it or throw it back into the digital depths. If you've hooked a program or graphic, you can decide simply to point to it now and download it later (when you've cleared out enough space from your amply stocked hard drive) or get it now, and open it to see if it fits your needs.
"Sports Fishers" also balance their acquisitive activities with participation in one or more discussion groups (either on Usenet or listservs) to keep up with sites others have found to be valuable, or to learn of emerging resources and tools. For example, a serious user will find immeasurable benefit in Gleason Sackman's "Net Happenings" list, which provides an constant, reliable stream of notices of new arrivals on the Internet.
In order to benefit from such utility, you are more likely than the Day Sailor to invest in your hobby, meaning that at minimum a high speed modem and SLIP account from an Internet provider or employer are expenses you've already justified in your mind and appear in your checkbook register.
Netting for a Living
Those whose livelihoods rely upon the bounty of the seas of information (which we call the Internet) resemble the commercial fishing fleets, with three vital distinctions. Rather than depleting the stocks of fish beyond territorial limits, they often miss their quarry simply because there are too many users on the system. Unlike their dwindling seafaring counterparts, the increasing legions of people whose professional lives intersect with the Internet show no signs of slowing growth. Finally, they frequently contribute information as well as retrieve it. Given the overwhelming numbers of Internet users and available postings, clearly something has to give.
The pressures upon real life fishing communities have led to the growth of "cooperatives", where owners of fishing boats collaborate and agree on the nature and size of their daily catch in order to preserve the livelihood over time. Again, our situation on the Internet is inverted - we suffer from information that is too plentiful rather than too scarce.
Looked at another way, the ugly head of pollution emerges, when one considers the quality of what you may catch. At present, there's no way to verify the accuracy or completeness of postings in cyberspace. An erroneous posting can propagate itself across hundreds of servers unknown to the managers of these systems due to the interlocking nature of pointers. Furthermore, the length and quantity of postings would predict that the skill of synthesizing the essence of many sources into clear, concise and convincing statements will be a most rewarded one in our electronic future. This is the "value" which commercial Internet services will "add" as the basis of their business: less is more.
Conclusion
Yes, it's easy to get lost at sea, and some folks require Dramamine to tolerate the loss of stability they left behind on the land. For those who do set sail, the adventure of discovery awaits, both on the voyage and upon arrival to a new, virtual land where the distinction between consumer and creator blur. It is as producers of knowledge that the potentials of the system will be realized, and in a relatively short time people have found their "sea legs" and evolved from casual cruising to creative contributor, working with peers they've never seen, building organized repositories of information on which the rest of us come to rely.
Copyright 1992, 1995 by Ferdi Serim. Permission is granted for individual use and reproduction provided that this document remains intact, with this copyright message clearly visible.
Ferdi Serim
May 30, 1995
Princeton Regional Schools phone: 609 683-4699
Computer Teacher/ District Computer Coordinator
ferdi_serim@monet.prs.k12.nj.us (school) fax 609 924-7347
ferdi@cosn.org (Consortium for School Networking)
"The unlived life is not worth examining."