rants, diatribes, even short stories and poems. Just when the
media of McLuhan were supposed to render obsolete the medium
of Shakespeare, the online world is experiencing the greatest
boom in letter writing since the 18th century.
</p>
<p> "It is my overwhelming belief that E-mail and computer conferencing
is teaching an entire generation about the flexibility and utility
of prose," writes Jon Carroll, a columnist at the San Francisco
Chronicle. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, compares
electronic bulletin boards with the "scribblers' compacts" of
the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in which members passed
letters from hand to hand, adding a little more at each turn.
David Sewell, an associate editor at the University of Arizona,
likens netwriting to the literary scene Mark Twain discovered
in San Francisco in the 1860s, "when people were reinventing
journalism by grafting it onto the tall-tale folk tradition."
Others hark back to Tom Paine and the Revolutionary War pamphleteers,
or even to the Elizabethan era, when, thanks to Gutenberg, a
generation of English writers became intoxicated with language.
</p>
<p> But such comparisons invite a question: If online writing today
represents some sort of renaissance, why is so much of it so
awful? For it can be very bad indeed: sloppy, meandering, puerile,
ungrammatical, poorly spelled, badly structured and at times
virtually content free. "HEY!!!1!" reads an all too typical
message on the Internet, "I TH1NK METALL1CA IZ REEL KOOL DOOD!1!!!"
</p>
<p> One reason, of course, is that E-mail is not like ordinary writing.
"You need to think of this as `written speech,'" says Gerard
Van der Leun, a literary agent based in Westport, Connecticut,
who has emerged as one of the pre-eminent stylists on the Net.
"These things are little more considered than coffeehouse talk
and a lot less considered than a letter. They're not to have
and hold; they're to fire and forget." Many online postings
are composed "live" with the clock ticking, using rudimentary
word processors on computer systems that charge by the minute
and in some cases will shut down without warning when an hour
runs out.
</p>
<p> That is not to say that with more time every writer on the Internet
would produce sparkling copy. Much of the fiction and poetry
is second-rate or worse, which is not surprising given that
the barriers to entry are so low. "In the real world," says
Mary Anne Mohanraj, a Chicago-based poet, "it takes a hell of
a lot of work to get published, which naturally weeds out a
lot of the garbage. On the Net, just a few keystrokes sends
your writing out to thousands of readers."
</p>
<p> But even among the reams of bad poetry, gems are to be found.
Mike Godwin, a Washington-based lawyer who posts under the pen
name "mnemonic," tells the story of Joe Green, a technical writer
at Cray Research who turned a moribund discussion group called
rec.arts.poems into a real poetry workshop by mercilessly critiquing
the pieces he found there. "Some people got angry and said if
he was such a god of poetry, why didn't he publish his poems
to the group?" recalls Godwin. "He did, and blew them all away."
Green's Well Met in Minnesota, a mock-epic account of a face-to-face
meeting with a fellow network scribbler, is now revered on the
Internet as a classic. It begins, "The truth is that when I
met Mark I was dressed as the Canterbury Tales. Rather difficult
to do as you might suspect, but I wanted to make a certain impression."
</p>
<p> The more prosaic technical and political discussion groups,
meanwhile, have become so crowded with writers crying for attention
that a Darwinian survival principle has started to prevail.
"It's so competitive that you have to work on your style if
you want to make any impact," says Jorn Barger, a software designer
in Chicago. Good writing on the Net tends to be clear, vigorous,
witty and above all brief. "The medium favors the terse," says
Crawford Kilian, a writing teacher at Capilano College in Vancouver,
British Columbia. "Short paragraphs, bulleted lists and one-liners
are the units of thought here."
</p>
<p> Some of the most successful netwriting is produced in computer
conferences, where writers compose in a kind of collaborative
heat, knocking ideas against one another until they spark. Perhaps
the best examples of this are found on the WELL, a Sausalito,
California, bulletin board favored by journalists. The caliber
of discussion is often so high that several publications--including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal--have printed excerpts from the WELL.
</p>
<p> Curiously, what works on the computer networks isn't necessarily
what works on paper. Netwriters freely lace their prose with
strange acronyms and "smileys," the little faces constructed
with punctuation marks and intended to convey the winks, grins
and grimaces of ordinary conversations. Somehow it all flows
together quite smoothly. On the other hand, polished prose copied
onto bulletin boards from books and magazines often seems long-winded
and phony. Unless they adjust to the new medium, professional
writers can come across as self-important blowhards in debates
with more nimble networkers. Says Brock Meeks, a Washington-based
reporter who covers the online culture for Communications Daily:
"There are a bunch of hacker kids out there who can string a
sentence together better than their blue-blooded peers simply
because they log on all the time and write, write, write."
</p>
<p> There is something inherently democratizing--perhaps even
revolutionary--about the technology. Not only has it enfranchised
thousands of would-be writers who otherwise might never have
taken up the craft, but it has also thrown together classes
of people who hadn't had much direct contact before: students,
