your net:// It's reading, but not as we know it ...

By PETER SINCLAIR

You may not be able to snuggle up in bed with your computer, but there's plenty of good stuff to read out there on the net.


In The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word ($US27.50 at www.amazon.com), Mitchell Stephens argues that movies, television and the graphical user interface of the internet have doomed the written word.

But it seems to me that words have never had it so good.

The net has repopularised reading with the mass audience, and although it's not reading as we knew it - there are no pages to turn, no snuggling up in bed is involved - medieval scribes probably felt much the same way when the first books challenged the scroll.

The morocco-bound novel in three volumes is dead - long live the novella!

For a jolly good read ...

Best Newspapers: the New York Times and the London Times both require onetime free registration (some of the former's articles are overlong for the attention-span of the net); the Nando Times was the first internet newspaper; and modesty certainly won't prevent me sending you to www.nzherald.co.nz

Best E-Zines: Salon , Feed and Slate all offer a guerrilla mix of literature, politics and iconoclasm in varying proportions.

As well, they've all got over the idea they're still on paper.

Best Lit: the New York Review of Books (gallantly ignoring the academic monograph crisis), Project Gutenberg, a collection of out-of-copyright full-text works Johannes himself would be proud of, and New Zealand's Arts & Letters Daily, a barbed selection of lit-crit links.

Best Rants: Suck, the distilled spirit of the net, bills itself as "a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun" and updates every weekday. For a from-the-ground-up viewpoint of the same terrain, it's Net Slaves: Horror Stories of Working on the Web. Locally, Bruce Simpson and Russell Brown can both work up a fine head of steam, while not always observing crucial distinctions between the rant and the whinge.

Best Tech: like Suck, HotWired is a sharp splinter of the original squashed-tree Wired magazine; turbulent Slashdot ("News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters") is the wild cry of the anti-Microsoft alternative; and for a reality check on e-business (last week's featured discussion: "Crashing Companies") try Red Herring.

Best Science: the New Scientist continues its tradition of accessible gee-whizzery with a selection of key articles from its print version, and New Zealand's SciTech Daily is one of the best global science roundups. The National Geographic, mainstay of the waiting-rooms of my youth, can be found at www.nationalgeographic.com/index.html, its science the comfy Victorian disciplines of archaeology, astronomy and anthropology, or (to take a "b") botany.

Best Diaries: Open Pages, a web-ring of confessions ranging from kitsch to compulsive. A Year in the Life of a Nerd became something of a web cult when 16-year-old Andrew Hicks began it in 1994 - honest and funny, it ended last year when Hicks left college and became a full-time journalist.

Most touching: From the Window, the work of a paralysed 12-year-old girl, Hero Joy Nightingale - part-diary, part e-zine, its celebrated contributors include Margaret Atwood, Kofi Annan and George Carey.

In the struggle between words and pictures, the word is doing fine.

Links


Amazon.com
New York Times

London Times

Nando Times

Herald Online

Salon

Feed

Slate

New York Review of Books

Project Gutenberg

Arts & Letters Daily

Suck

Net Slaves

Bruce Simpson

Russell Brown

HotWired

Slashdot

Red Herring

New Scientist

SciTech Daily

The National Geographic

Open Pages

A Year in the Life of a Nerd

From the Window


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