/lit/ - Literature

This book is from 1994 but it's oddly compelling. It's just her memoir of pissing about on the internet for months. Here's the blurb

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"The information Superhighway's bright corporate future may or may not come, but the Net, shows Herz, already has a fully developed and wonderfully idiosyncratic culture. Herz here captures the grungy (if that can be said of the Net's ghostly text-based presence), junk-food and black-coffee, 24-hour-a-day reality of the Net. She describes the endless lines of text messages, the weird Star Wars-like virtual bar-at-the-end-of-the-universe sensibility of IRC real-time chat; the head-splitting fantasy game-like intricacies of Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs); the electronic cross-dressing (no one's "persona" can be taken seriously); and the curious-and sometimes poignant-personalities that haunt the Net's more obscure byways. There's hilarious stuff here: The Alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die newsgroup, dedicated to destroying the "purple pederast"; or Alt.alien.visitors and its loopy discussions of good and bad space aliens; or the "counter-intuitive" cyber-serenity of ZenMoo, the meditative site that rewards its users for logging on and doing nothing ("hair will grow on your palms if you keep typing," says the Moo program). By using numerous excerpts of screen text, the book is almost too effective at recreating the numbing, all-text look of the pre-World Wide Web Net. Indeed, most remarkable is the extraordinary amount of time ("12, 15, 20 hours a day") Herz and other hardcore cybernauts spend staring into the sickly glow of computer screens. Despite coming to question her own online habit, Herz, a staff member of Wired magazine, has written a brisk, funny and detailed homage to Net culture and conveys some measure of its addictive fascination."