By the fandom analogy, then, the Net should soon develop its own form of the genzine. Users will flock to this new entity, avoiding flamers, asininity, and noise. After all, the Net is an open invitation to have a 100 million pen pals. Even with gopher programs, you spend much time filtering the nonsensical and boring.
Few people truly want raw data. They seek information, taste, even wisdom. Filtering the Net stream is essential, and finder software continues to improve beyond the simple key-word seekers of today. But these still take our scarcest resource: time. Often, gobs of it.
The Net's siren call, people sharing your very own obsession, is addictive for many of us. About 7 percent of the United States uses the Net now. The World Wide Web has 10 million home pages, where one can display for the virtual passers-by. In less than six months, the number of web pages doubles; the surge is faster than exponential.
If the Net's growth profile parallels that of TVs, VCRs, and other electronic conduits, it will saturate with over three-quarters of the country online, some 200-plus million users. But the Net isn't merely national. By saturation time in a decade or two, there could be a billion users.
Language problems will be only a minor barrier by then. Programs for crude translation already flourish on the Net. This cornucopia of contact will need a new generation of filters, and something better than filters.
We want more, sureand we'll get itbut we also come to want better. But even the best filter is inherently passive. None can fulfill the higher functions of helping to generate the quality material most readers want.
Think of trying to find a discourse on, say, the cultural impact of the Beatles. There may be hundreds of relevant World Wide Web sites, but you want a treatment for your 12-year-old. And you wouldn't mind reading some adult nostalgic reflection on the Fab Four yourself.
First you pick key words: Beatles, culture , impact, etc. Then you set separate vocabulary levels for both of you, which winnows down the fare to perhaps a few dozen sites. Now add a syntax evaluator, to eliminate erudite postmodern rigmarole your daughter (and probably you, too) couldn't stomach. She won't want to see analysis that compares the Beatles with the Kinks, say, but you might, so you tailor your list for that.
By this time you're facing two customized sets of choices, probably only a handful of potential sources. Only then need real browsing begin. But who made these documents coherent, deft, interesting?
The authorplus an editor. Someone must go out into the datascape and find the writers who can be urged to do the right job at the right time, and then worry at the extra drafts, polish ing them properly. As Virginia Postrel has emphasized, the Net Age will become the Editors' Era. It mustby analogy with our present.
In talk radio and late-night television, star figures filter the info-stream for their simpatico audience. Their following finds them and sticks around, a fandom defined by interest, not geog raphy or income.
Rush Limbaugh is essentially a highly personal editor. On the Net, most people don't want or need an idiosyncratic figure marshaling material for them. But they will come to enjoy a certain style and flavor, just as you tasted many magazines before settling on this one. Rather than favoring a journal of policy wonkspeak, you settled on a rather broader view, savoring the world with an attitude.
A Net genzine would probably begin as a "Best Of" feature, with pieces gleaned worldwide and labeled by interest-area. The better ones will go pro, requiring a fee to log onto the edited database. Authors will get paid. To raise quality, editors will start to demand revisions of raw Net material, using the carrot of payment. Genzines will become labyrinthian magazines.
Science fiction fandom evolved through this stage in the 1940s, then beyond, ever-restless. General consensus holds that the quality of s.f. fandom peaked in the 1950s and '60s. That's when I entered, a rank neo, into a community of fanzines honed by criticism and decades-old tradition. The humorous, personal essay reigned supreme. Some fans flowered into professionals.
By then, fandom had grown large and began to split into sub-fandoms, often groups which had little real need for the written word: fans of medieval reenactments, space advocates, cos tumers. Well before the 1970s, fandoms devoted to other areas had begun, including the Baker Street Irregulars for Sherlock Holmes, 'zines for the mystery and romance genres, even for model railroaders.
Probably the Net will end up as the fandoms have todaydispersed, intense, with highly evolved functions to screen out noise. Fandom invented a women-only APA, a fanzine designed to increase activity itself (appropriately titled Fanac), secret APAs. We should expect the Net to blossom with similarly ingenious social molds. Analogy to fandom can tell us where we should start.
Wired's Kevin Kelly thinks that the Net will become the dominant force in our culture. I rather doubt it; who in the 19th century would have described the post office that way? Yet it seemed equally wondrous at the time. But if Kelly is right or even half-right, an eye cast to our past is even more relevant now.
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