What Your Children Are Doing on the Information Highway

“If some unemployed punk in New Jersey can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka.”--Dennis Miller

Introduction: Buy This Book or Eat My Dust
Frequently Asked Questions
The Chapters

What Your Children Are Doing on the Information Highway is not Yet Another How to Get on the Net book that’s out of date before it even goes to print. Oh, sure, there’s a chapter describing how to get on the net yesterday, if you happen to be one of the proofreaders who got to read the chapter before it’s obsolete. But that’s obligatory, and you’re not going to pay attention to it anyway.

What Your Children Are Doing is for those people who don’t understand this highway shit, don’t want to be on any highway, and want to know why the hell their children talk in a foreign language.

It’s about the generation gap. The information gap. And the power gap.

From 1775 to 1799, the introduction of the personal rifle changed the course of history. The rifle put the balance of power-by-force into the hands of individuals. With that power, the people toppled governments, and took control of their own destiny in the force-ridden time of their age.

The personal computer is the rifle of our age, and our children will use them as our great-great-great-grandfathers used the rifle.

Introduction

  1. Buy This Book or Eat My Dust
  2. Who the Hell is Jerry Stratton?

Can’t Get There From Here

  1. Information Backroads
  2. The New Literacy
  3. Internet World
  4. The History of the Information Highway
  5. The History of the World Wide Web
  6. Living in a World of Text
  7. Is There Anyone Out There?
  8. Go West, Young Men!
  9. A New Language
  10. Lime Disease on the Information Sidewalk
  11. Identity
  12. I Need Drugs!
  13. Rebel Without a Modem

The Kinder Gap

  1. Boys in the Virtual Attic
  2. English Addicts and Saudi Gamers
  3. The Joy of Publishing
  4. Brave New Word
  5. Exercising Control Through Anarchy
  6. Natural Law
  7. Culture Shock
  8. Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
  9. Faceless on the Net
  10. The Underground Highway
  11. Cerebus the Gopher
  12. Usenet
  13. What About Alt.Sex?
  14. alt.fan.oj-simpson.die.die.die
  15. The City of God
  16. Say You Want a Revolution?
  17. Cybercash
  18. You’re Paying For It, Sucker!
  19. The Generation Gap
  20. The Pinball Wizard

InfoShok

  1. Guerilla Semiotics
  2. Information Media
  3. The Internet Library Today
  4. Power
  5. The Internet Board of Control
  6. The Library of the Future
  7. The Information Promise
  8. I Sing the School Electric
  9. Pushing the Envelope
  10. Cyberpolitics
  11. The InfoPoor
  12. MUSHing the Electronic Frontier
  13. Murder in Cyberspace
  14. Do Not Bend, Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate
  15. Alpha, Beta, Gamma
  16. American Intifada
  17. Another Lost Soul on the Information Highway
  18. Junk Mail
  19. Addicted!
  20. A Wake on the Internet
  21. Good News!

Why Don’t We Do It In the Road?

  1. Timed Obsolescence
  2. What You Need
  3. What You Want
  4. Navigating the Net
  5. Serving Up

Internet Death Imminent: Film at Eleven

  1. Federal Government: Exit, Stage Left
  2. Pileups on the Infobahn
  3. Mimsy Were the Borogoves
  4. Frontiers are for Children
  5. Internet Farm
  6. Signature

First completed February, 1995. Published on the web July-August 1995.

Jerry