Cybershopping on the Interweb
Special mention of the weekend goes to Word On The Street, one of two bookstalls on Chapel Market in Islington (the other is composed of the most astounding collection of saga books I have ever clapped eyes on: acres and acres of Mills & Boon, Danielle Steele and pastel covers). Word On The Street has got trays and trays of Penguins and Pelicans (which I don't hate at all, whatever I said), including a whole box of Modern Poets I want to go back for, and plenty more besides.
Not only did they help me trawl for NEL books, they sorted me out with one copy of the previously mentioned Epic of Gilgamesh for £1 and one of Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Gender Adventure by Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan. Nearly Roadkill (1996) is a rather interesting piece of earlyish cyberculturalism in a style that's pretty much disappeared - breathless excitement at a world of possibilities that died with cybernannies, amazon, lastminute.com and the dominance of the WWW over BBs, newsgroups and IRC. But let's not be geeks about it.
Bornstein and Sullivan are academics, writers and gender refuseniks who write animatedly about the possibilities of mind meeting mind on the interweb without all the preconceptions of the flesh: two protagonists who steadfastly refuse to reveal their physical gender while battling Registration, the government-mandated process by which everyone must give all their personal data over so that the corporations can target them more efficiently. While the latter is not exactly a fantastically original concept, this is surely one of the first to put it in the context of the newly web-enabled world. It reminded me a lot of Surfing the Internet by J.C.Herz, the book that got me to swap the (then) all-dominating CompuServe for a dial-up connection way back when in 1996. The ex-Wired columnist related stories of MUDs, MOOs and online gender-swapping that flipped my tiny little mind, which is basically the point of books; fiction, non-fiction, or somewhere in between.
As I said, this genre has basically died with the corporatisation of the Internet, a few office-email-affair novellettes notwithstanding. Even my early cyberculture theorist faves like Douglas Coupland (now so maudlin as to be barely readable) and Douglas Rushkoff seem to have gone off the boil. And if you think Science Fiction is the answer, let me remind you that the mighty William Gibson didn't go online until long after Neuromancer, the novel that invented cyberspace.
Not only did they help me trawl for NEL books, they sorted me out with one copy of the previously mentioned Epic of Gilgamesh for £1 and one of Nearly Roadkill: An Infobahn Gender Adventure by Kate Bornstein and Caitlin Sullivan. Nearly Roadkill (1996) is a rather interesting piece of earlyish cyberculturalism in a style that's pretty much disappeared - breathless excitement at a world of possibilities that died with cybernannies, amazon, lastminute.com and the dominance of the WWW over BBs, newsgroups and IRC. But let's not be geeks about it.
Bornstein and Sullivan are academics, writers and gender refuseniks who write animatedly about the possibilities of mind meeting mind on the interweb without all the preconceptions of the flesh: two protagonists who steadfastly refuse to reveal their physical gender while battling Registration, the government-mandated process by which everyone must give all their personal data over so that the corporations can target them more efficiently. While the latter is not exactly a fantastically original concept, this is surely one of the first to put it in the context of the newly web-enabled world. It reminded me a lot of Surfing the Internet by J.C.Herz, the book that got me to swap the (then) all-dominating CompuServe for a dial-up connection way back when in 1996. The ex-Wired columnist related stories of MUDs, MOOs and online gender-swapping that flipped my tiny little mind, which is basically the point of books; fiction, non-fiction, or somewhere in between.
As I said, this genre has basically died with the corporatisation of the Internet, a few office-email-affair novellettes notwithstanding. Even my early cyberculture theorist faves like Douglas Coupland (now so maudlin as to be barely readable) and Douglas Rushkoff seem to have gone off the boil. And if you think Science Fiction is the answer, let me remind you that the mighty William Gibson didn't go online until long after Neuromancer, the novel that invented cyberspace.
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