You eat your own words

The lead in the Feb. 16 New York Times Book Review's review of John Seabrook's "Deeper" is a thoughtful piece of work:

"You are your words" is the epigraph greeting users as they log on to the Well, an electronic bulletin-board system in northern California. Cyberspace remains a territory comprising mostly sentences and phrases, which is why the Well chose to place this admonition as a reminder to its users -- what you write here is who you are.

Often, when mainstream media institutions get a digital story wrong, it's because they're relying on writers who don't know the online turf. But that wasn't the problem here. The author of the review, David Bennahum, runs a newsletter on Internet issues and history called Meme, hosts a conference on Electric Minds and is preparing his own book on a subject similar to Seabrook's. (Contacted for comment, Bennahum will only say that he "regrets the error.")

The glaring misquotation looks less like a slip and more like an indicator of deeper misreading as you go further in the review. Bennahum's chief complaint is that New Yorker writer Seabrook fails to engage with his subject, "remaining aloof, refusing to join the natives in their epistolary adventure."

Wired gets pushy

The palm of a ghostly blue hand jumps off the cover of the March Wired and into your face. "We interrupt this magazine for a special bulletin," reads the headline. "PUSH!"

The cover continues: "Kiss your browser goodbye: The radical future of media beyond the Web. By the editors of Wired. Remember the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft? Well, forget it. The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance."

"Push media" means programs like Pointcast and Marimba's Castanet -- schemes for automating the transmission of content across the Internet, so that instead of you going to a Web site and "pulling" it down to your computer, the content providers "push" their wares out to you.

"Push" promises Net companies a new way to begin making actual money -- and threatens to transform the Web into a digital update of the broadcast media we already know so well. It's certainly a major story, and you can't fault Wired for jumping on it.

America may be on hold —
but the Internet's not

America Online fought off hordes of angry users and their lawyers over the past two weeks. Users were taking advantage of AOL's new pricing plan, which turned off the service's hourly meter and offered unlimited hours for $19.95 a month. Usage of AOL skyrocketed beyond what the network had predicted, and users started getting busy signals when their modems tried to dial in. As some users grabbed phone lines and wouldn't let them go for fear of not being able to log in again, the problem spiraled, until AOL — threatened by action from various state attorneys general — had to agree to provide angry customers with refunds.

It was a big story that newspapers and TV stations understandably jumped on. But in their haste they got two things awfully confused: AOL and the Internet itself.

Predictions of "Internet traffic jams" have been bouncing around for so long now that some clueless news editors jumped when they heard about AOL's woes. Here it was — Internet gridlock! And that's how they spun the story. Even the careful New York Times blew its Page 1 headline: "Pushed by States, America Online Agrees to Refunds in Internet Jam," it announced.

Now, doubtless, large numbers of AOL's phone-line-hogging users were in fact using the service to access Internet-based Web sites or to send e-mail across the Net to users outside of AOL. But the problem was exclusively with AOL, not the Internet. There was no "Internet Jam"; if anything, the fact that AOL users were having a hard time accessing that network probably reduced a little of the load of Internet traffic.

AOL doesn't own enough modems to keep its customers happy right now. That's a problem for AOL, not for the Internet. The Internet has its own long-term traffic concerns, and there are all sorts of efforts underway to improve its infrastructure, increase capacity by adding backbone lines and provide faster, more reliable service. Someday maybe there'll be a real "Internet Jam." And maybe by then the mainstream media will be able to distinguish one kind of network from another.