You’re about to embark on an exciting experience as you become one of the millions of citizens of the Internet. In spite of what you might have heard, the Internet can be mastered by ordinary people before they earn a college degree and even if they’re not majoring in rocket science.

Much of the confusion over the Internet comes from two sources. One is terminology. Just as the career you’re preparing for has its own special vocabulary, so does the Internet. You’d be hard pressed to join in the shoptalk of archeologists, librarians, or carpenters if you didn’t speak their language. Don’t expect to plop yourself down in the middle of the Internet without some buzzwords under your belt, either.

The second source of confusion is that there are often many ways to accomplish the same ends on the Internet. This is a direct by-product of the freedom so highly cherished by Net citizens. When someone has an idea for doing something, he or she puts it out there and lets the Internet community decide its merits. As a result, it’s difficult to put down in writing the one exact way to send email or find information on slugs or whatever.

Most of the material you’ll encounter in this book applies to programs that run on the Macintosh computer. If you own or use a PC, you’ll discover there are some cosmetic and technical differences. On the other hand, both computers offer the same major functionality. What you can do on the Mac you can usually do on the PC, and vice versa. If you can’t find a particular command or function mentioned in the book on your computer, chances are it’s there, but in a different place or with a slightly different name. Check the manual or online help that came with your computer, or ask a more computer-savvy friend or professor.

And relax. Getting up to speed on the Internet takes a little time, but the effort will be well rewarded. Approach learning your way around the Internet with the same enthusiasm and curiosity you approach learning your way around a new college campus. This isn’t a competition. Nobody’s keeping score. And the only winner will be you.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan presaged the existence of the Internet when he described electronic media as an extension of our central nervous system. On the other hand, today’s students introduced to the Internet for the first time describe it as “Way cool.”

No matter which description you favor, you are immersed in a period in our culture that is transforming the way we live by transforming the nature of the information we live by. As recently as 1980, intelligence was marked by “knowing things.” If you were born in that year, by the time you were old enough to cross the street by yourself, that definition had changed radically. Today, in a revolution that makes McLuhan’s vision tangible, events, facts, rumors, and gossip are distributed instantly to all parts of the global body. The effects are equivalent to a shot of electronic adrenaline. No longer the domain of the privileged few, information is shared by all the inhabitants of McLuhan’s global village. Meanwhile, the concept of information as intelligence feels as archaic as a television remote control with a wire on it (ask your parents about that).

With hardly more effort than it takes to rub your eyes open in the morning you can connect with the latest news, with gossip about your favorite music group or TV star, with the best places to eat on spring break, with the weather back home, or with the trials and tribulations of that soap opera character whose life conflicts with your history class.

You can not only carry on a real-time conversation with your best friend at a college half a continent away you can see and hear her, too. Or, you can play interactive games with a dozen or more world-wide, world-class, challengers; and that’s just for fun.

When it comes to your education, the Internet has shifted the focus from amassing information to putting that information to use. Newspaper and magazine archives are now almost instantly available, as are the contents of many reference books. Distant and seemingly unapproachable, experts are found answering questions in discussion groups or in electronic newsletters.

The Internet also addresses the major problem facing all of us in our split-second, efficiency-rated culture: Where do we find the time? The Internet allows professors and students to keep in touch, to collaborate and learn, without placing unreasonable demands on individual schedules. Professors are posting everything from course syllabi to homework solutions on the Internet, and are increasingly answering questions online, all in an effort to ease the pressure for face-to-face meetings by supplementing them with cyberspace offices. The Internet enables students and professors to expand office hours into a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation. Many classes have individual sites at which enrolled students can gather electronically to swap theories, ideas, resources, gripes, and triumphs.

By freeing us from some of the more mundane operations of information gathering, and by sharpening our information-gathering skills in other areas, the Internet encourages us to be more creative and imaginative. Instead of devoting most of our time to gathering information and precious little to analyzing and synthesizing it, the Internet tips the balance in favor of the skills that separate us from silicon chips. Other Internet citizens can gain the same advantage, however, and as much as the Internet ties us together, it simultaneously emphasizes our individual skills—our ability to connect information in new, meaningful, and exciting ways. Rarely have we had the opportunity to make connections and observations on such a wide range of topics, to create more individual belief systems, and to chart a path through learning that makes information personally useful and meaningful.

The 20th century’s greatest advance in personal communication and freedom of expression began as a tool for national defense. In the mid-1960s, the Department of Defense was searching for an information analogy to the new Interstate Highway System, a way to move computations and computing resources around the country in the event the Cold War caught fire. The immediate predicament, however, had to do with the Defense Department’s budget, and the millions of dollars spent on computer research at universities and think tanks. Much of these millions was spent on acquiring, building, or modifying large computer systems to meet the demands of the emerging fields of computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and multiprocessing (where one computer was shared among dozens of different tasks).

While this research was distributed across the country, the unwieldy, often temperamental, computers were not. Though researchers at MIT had spare time on their computer, short of packing up their notes and traveling to Massachusetts, researchers at Berkeley had no way to use it. Instead, Berkeley computer scientists would wind up duplicating MIT hardware in California. Wary of being accused of re-inventing the wheel, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the funding arm of the Defense Department, invested in the ARPANET, a private network that would allow disparate computer systems to communicate with each other. Researchers could remain ensconced among their colleagues at their home campuses while using computing resources at government research sites thousands of miles away.

A small cadre of ARPANET citizens soon began writing computer programs to perform little tasks across the Internet. Most of these programs, while ostensibly meeting immediate research needs, were written for the challenge of writing them. These programmers, for example, created the first email systems. They also created games like Space Wars and Adventure. Driven in large part by the novelty and practicality of email, businesses and institutions accepting government research funds begged and borrowed their way onto the ARPANET, and the number of connections swelled.

As the innocence of the 1960s gave way the business sense of the 1980s, the government eased out of the networking business, turning the ARPANET (now Internet) over to its users. While we capitalize the word “Internet”, it may surprise you to learn there is no “Internet, Inc.,” no business in charge of this uniquely postmodern creation. Administration of this world-wide communication complex is still handled by the cooperating institutions and regional networks that comprise the Internet. The word “Internet” denotes a specific interconnected network of networks, and not a corporate entity.

Just as no one owns the worldwide communication complex that is the Internet, there is no formal organization among the collection of hundreds of thousands of computers that make up the part of the Net called the World Wide Web.

If you’ve never seriously used the Web, you are about to take your first steps on what can only be described as an incredible journey. Initially, though, you might find it convenient to think of the Web as a giant television network with millions of channels. It’s safe to say that, among all these channels, there’s something for you to watch. Only, how to find it? You could click through the channels one by one, of course, but by the time you found something of interest it would (1)be over or (2)leave you wondering if there wasn’t something better on that you’re missing.

A more efficient way to search for what you want would be to consult some sort of TV listing. While you could skim through pages more rapidly than channels, the task would still be daunting. A more creative approach would allow you to press a button on your remote control that would connect you to a channel of interest; what’s more, that channel would contain the names (or numbers) of other channels with similar programs. Those channels in turn would contain information about other channels. Now you could zip through this million-channel universe, touching down only at programs of potential interest. This seems far more effective than the hunt-and-peck method of the traditional couch potato.

If you have a feel for how this might work for television, you have a feel for what it’s like to journey around (or surf) the Web. Instead of channels on the Web, we have Web sites. Each site contains one or more pages. Each page may contain, among other things, links to other pages, either in the same site or in other sites, anywhere in the world. These other pages may elaborate on the information you’re looking at or may direct you to related but not identical information, or even provide contrasting or contradictory points of view; and, of course, these pages could have links of their own.

Web sites are maintained by businesses, institutions, affinity groups, professional organizations, government departments, and ordinary people anxious to express opinions, share information, sell products, or provide services. Because these Web sites are stored electronically, updating them is more convenient and practical than updating printed media. That makes Web sites far more dynamic than other types of research material you may be used to, and it means a visit to a Web site can open up new opportunities that weren’t available as recently as a few hours ago.

The invention that unveils these revolutionary possibilities is called hypertext. Hypertext is a technology for combining text, graphics, sounds, video, and links on a single World Wide Web page. Click on a link and you’re transported, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, to a new page, a new address, a new environment for research and communication.

Links come in three flavors: text, picture, and hot spot. A text link may be a letter, a word, a phrase, a sentence, or any contiguous combination of text characters. You can identify text links at a glance because the characters are underlined, and are often displayed in a unique color, setting the link apart from the rest of the text on the page. Picture links are pictures or other graphic elements. On the Web, a picture may not only be worth a thousand words, but it may also be the start of a journey into a whole new corner of cyberspace.

The third kind of link, the hot spot, is neither underlined nor bordered, a combination which would make it impossible to spot, were it not for a Web convention that offers you a helping hand finding all types of links. This helping hand is, well, a hand. Whenever the mouse cursor passes over a link, the cursor changes from an arrow to a hand. Wherever you see the hand icon, you can click and retrieve another Web page. Sweep the cursor over an area of interest, see the hand, follow the link, and you’re surfing the Web.

Zipping around the Web in this way may seem exciting, even serendipitous, but it’s also fraught with perils. How, for instance, do you revisit a page of particular interest? Or share a page with a classmate? Or cite a page as a reference for a professor? Web page designers assign names, or titles, to their pages; unfortunately, there’s nothing to prevent two designers from assigning the same title to different pages.

An instrument that uniquely identifies Web pages does exist. It’s called a Universal Resource Locator (URL), the cyber-signposts of the World Wide Web. URLs contain all the information necessary to locate:

the page containing the information you’re looking for;

the computer that hosts (stores) that page of information;

the form the information is stored in.

A typical URL looks like this:

http://www.abacon.com/homepage.html

You enter it into the Location field at the top of your browser window. Hit the Return (or Enter) key and your browser will deliver to your screen the exact page specified. When you click on a link, you’re actually using a shorthand alternative to typing the URL yourself because the browser does it for you. In fact, if you watch the “Location” field when you click on a link, you’ll see its contents change to the URL you’re traveling to.

How does your browser—or the whole World Wide Web structure, for that matter—know where you’re going? As arcane as the URL appears, there is a logical explanation to its apparent madness. (This is true not only of URLs but also of your computer experience in general. Because a computer’s “intelligence” only extends to following simple instructions exactly, most of the commands, instructions, and procedures you’ll encounter have simple underlying patterns. Once you familiarize yourself with these patterns, you’ll find you’re able to make major leaps in your understanding of new Internet features.)

To unscramble the mysteries of World Wide Web addresses, we’ll start at the end of the URL and work our way toward the front.

/homepage.html

This is the name of a single file or document. Eventually, the contents of this file/document will be transferred over the Internet to your computer. However, because there are undoubtedly thousands of files on the Internet with this name, we need to clarify our intentions a bit more.

www.abacon.com

This is the name of a particular Internet Web server, a computer whose job it is to forward Web pages to you on request. By Internet convention, this name is unique. The combination of

www.abacon.com/homepage.html

identifies a unique file/document on a unique Web server on the World Wide Web. No other file has this combined address, so there’s no question about which file/document to transfer to you.

The characters http:// at the beginning of the URL identify the method by which the file/document will be transferred. The letters stand for HyperText Transfer Protocol.

Let’s pause for a quick check of your Web navigation skills. Look at the sample web page on the next page. How many links does it contain?

Did you find all five? That’s right, five:

The word “links” in the second line below the seaside picture;

The sentence “What about me?”;

The word “cyberspace” in the quick brown fox sentence;

The red and white graphic in the lower left-hand corner of the page. The blue border around it matches the blue of the text links;

The hot spot in the seaside picture. We know there’s at least one link in the picture, because the cursor appears as a hand. (There may be more hot spots on the page, but we can’t tell from this picture alone.)

Now you know that a URL uniquely identifies a page and that links used as shorthand for URLs enable you to travel from page to page in the Web; but what if a link takes you someplace you don’t want to go? Missing page messages take several forms, such as URL 404, Object not on this server, Missing Object, Page not Found, but they all lead to the same place—a dead end. The page specified by the link or URL no longer exists. There are many reasons for missing pages. You may have entered the URL incorrectly. Every character must be precise and no spaces are allowed. More than likely, though, especially if you arrived here via a link, the page you’re after has been moved or removed. Remember, anybody can create a link to any page. In the spirit of the Internet, there are no forms to fill out, no procedures to follow. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the owner of a page is under no obligation to inform the owners of links pointing to it that the page location has changed. In fact, there’s no way for the page owner to even know about all the links to her page. Yes, the Internet’s spirit of independence proves frustrating sometimes, but you’ll find these small inconveniences are a cheap price to pay for the benefits you receive. Philosophy aside, though, we’re still stuck on a page of no interest to us. The best strategy is to back up and try another approach.

Every time you click on the Back button, you return to the previous page you visited. That’s because your browser keeps track of the pages you visit and the order in which you visit them. The Back icon, and its counterpart, the Forward icon, allow you to retrace the steps, forward and backward, of your cyberpath. Sometimes you may want to move two, three, or a dozen pages at once. Although you can click the Back or Forward icons multiple times, Web browsers offer an easier navigation shortcut. Clicking on the Go menu in the menu bar displays a list of your most recently visited pages, in the order you’ve been there. Unlike the Back or Forward icons, you can select any page from the menu, and a single click takes you directly there. There’s no need to laboriously move one page at a time.

Quick Check

As a quick review, here’s what we know about navigating the Web so far:

Enter a URLdirectly into the Location field;

Click on a link;

Use the Back or Forward icons;

Select a page from the Go menu.

How do we return to a page hours, days, or even months later? One way is to write down the URLs of every page we may want to revisit. There’s got to be a better way, and there is: We call them bookmarks (on Netscape Communicator) or favorites (on Microsoft Internet Explorer).

Like their print book namesakes, Web bookmarks (and favorites) flag specific Web pages. Selecting an item from the Bookmark/Favorites menu, like selecting an item from the Go menu, is the equivalent of entering a URL into the Location field of your browser, except that items in the Bookmark/Favorites menu are ones you’ve added yourself and represent pages visited over many surfing experiences, not just the most recent one.

To select a page from your bookmark list, pull down the Bookmark/ Favorites menu and click on the desired entry. In Netscape Communicator, clicking on the Add Bookmark command makes a bookmark entry for the current page. Add Page to Favorites performs the same function in Microsoft Internet Explorer.

To save a favorite page location, use the Add feature available on both browsers. Clicking that feature adds the location of the current page to your Bookmark/Favorites menu. A cautionary note is in order here. Your bookmark or favorites list physically exists only on your personal computer, which means that if you connect to the Internet on a different computer, your list won’t be available. If you routinely connect to the Internet from a computer lab, for example, get ready to carry the URLs for your favorite Web sites in your notebook or your head.

Returning to our cable television analogy, you may recall that we conveniently glossed over the question of how we selected a starting channel in the first place. With a million TV channels, or several million Web pages, we can’t depend solely on luck guiding us to something interesting.

On the Web, we solve the problem with specialized computer programs called search engines that crawl through the Web, page by page, cataloging

its contents. As different software designers developed search strategies, entrepreneurs established Web sites where any user could find pages containing particular words and phrases. Today, Web sites such as Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite, WebCrawler, and MetaCrawler offer you a “front door” to the Internet that begins with a search for content of interest.

The URLs for some popular search sites are:

Excite www.excite.com

Yahoo! www.yahoo.com

AltaVista www.altavista.digital.com

WebCrawler www.webcrawler.com

MetaCrawler www.metacrawler.com

Infoseek www.infoseek.com

EBlast www.eblast.com

HotBot www.hotbot.com

Let’s perform a simple search using HotBot to find information about the history of the Internet.

Out of curiosity, let’s try our history of the Internet search using a different search engine. When we search for the phrase “history of the internet” using WebCrawler, the quotation marks serve the same purpose as selecting “the exact phrase” option in Hotbot. The WebCrawler search only finds 504 hits. Some are the same as those found using HotBot, some are different. Different searching strategies and software algorithms make using more than one search engine a must for serious researchers.

The major search engines conveniently provide you with tips to help you get the most out of their searches. These include ways to use AND and OR to narrow down searches, and ways to use NOT to eliminate unwanted hits.

Each search engine also uses a slightly different approach to cataloging the Web, so at different sites your results might vary. Often, one search engine provides better results (more relevant hits) in your areas of interest; sometimes, the wise strategy is to provide the same input to several different engines. No one search engine does a perfect job all the time, so experience will dictate the one that’s most valuable for you.

Quick Check

Let’s review our searching strategies:

Visit one of the search engine sites;

Enter key words or phrases that best describe the search criteria;

Narrow the search if necessary by using options such as “all the words” or “the exact phrase.”On some search engines, you may use the word “and” or the symbol “|” to indicate words that all must appear on a page;

Try using the same criteria with different search engines.

Downloading files from the Internet allows less responsible Net citizens to unleash onto your computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, all dangerous programs that fool you into thinking they’re doing one thing while they’re actually erasing your hard disk or performing some other undesirable task. Protection is your responsibility.

One way to reduce the risk of contracting a virus is to download software from reliable sites. Corporations such as Microsoft and Apple take care to make sure downloadable software is virus free. So do most institutions that provide software downloads as a public service (such as the Stanford University archives of Macintosh software). Be especially careful of programs you find on someone’s home page. If you’re not sure about safe download sources, ask around in a newsgroup (discussed shortly), talk to friends, or check with the information technology center on campus.

You can also buy and use a reliable virus program. Norton, Symantec, and Dr. Solomon all sell first-rate programs for the Mac and PC. You can update these programs right from the Internet so they’ll detect the most current viruses. Most of the time, these programs can disinfect files/documents on your disk that contain viruses. Crude as it may sound, downloading programs from the Internet without using a virus check is like having unprotected sex with a stranger. While downloading software may not be life threatening, imagine the consequences if your entire hard disk, including all your course work and software, is totally obliterated. It won’t leave you feeling very good.

Email was one of the first applications created for the Internet by its designers, who sought a method of communicating with each other directly from their keyboards. Your electronic Internet mailbox is to email what a post office box is to “snail mail” (the name Net citizens apply to ordinary, hand-delivered mail). This mailbox resides on the computer of your Internet Service Provider (ISP). That’s the organization providing you with your Internet account. Most of the time your ISP will be your school; but, you may contract with one of the commercial providers, such as America Online, Netcom, Microsoft Network, Earthlink, or AT&T. The Internet doesn’t deliver a message to your door but instead leaves it in a conveniently accessible place (your mailbox) in the post office (the computer of your ISP), until you retrieve the mail using your combination (password).

If you currently have computer access to the Internet, your school or ISP assigned you a user name (also called a user id, account name, or account number). This user name may be your first name, your first initial and the first few characters of your last name, or some strange combination of numbers and letters only a computer could love. An email address is a combination of your user name and the unique address of the computer through which you access your email, like this:

username@computername.edu

The three letters after the dot, in this case “edu,” identify the top level “domain.”There are six common domain categories in use: edu (educational), com (commercial), org (organization), net (network), mil (military), and gov (government). The symbol “@”—called the “at” sign in typewriter days—serves two purposes: For computers, it provides a neat, clean separation between your user name and the computer name; for people, it makes Internet addresses more pronounceable. Your address is read: user name “at” computer name “dot” e-d-u. Suppose your Internet user name is “a4736g” and your ISP is Allyn & Bacon, the publisher of this book. Your email address might look like

a4736g@abacon.com

and you would tell people your email address is “ay-four-seven-three-six-gee at ay bacon dot com.”

You use email with the aid of special programs called mail clients. As with search engines, mail clients have the same set of core features, but your access to these features varies with the type of program. On both the PC and the Mac, Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer give you access to mail clients while you’re plugged into the Web. That way you can pick up and send mail while you’re surfing the Web.

The basic email service functions are creating and sending mail, reading mail, replying to mail, and forwarding mail. First we’ll examine the process of sending and reading mail, and then we’ll discuss how to set up your programs so that your messages arrive safely.

Let’s look at a typical mail client screen, in this case from Netscape Communicator 4. You reach this screen by choosing Messenger Inbox from the menu. Along the top of the screen are icons denoting the basic mail service functions. To send a message from scratch, choose the New Msg icon to create a blank message form, which has fields for the recipient’s address and the subject, and a window for the text
of the message.

Fill in the recipient’s address in the “To” field, just above the arrow. Use your own address. We’ll send email to ourselves and use the same message to practice sending email and reading it as well; then we’ll know if your messages come out as expected.

Click in the “Subject” field and enter a word or phrase that generally describes the topic of the message. Since we’re doing this for the first time, let’s type “Maiden Email Voyage.”

Now click anywhere in the text window and enter your message. Let’s say “Hi. Thanks for guiding me through sending my first email.” You’ll find that the mail client works here like a word processing program, which means you can insert and delete words and characters and highlight text.

Now click the Send icon. You’ve just created and sent your first email message. In most systems, it takes a few seconds to a few minutes for a message to yourself to reach your mailbox, so you might want to take a short break before continuing. When you’re ready to proceed, close the Send Mail window and click the Get Msg icon in the Inbox window.

Now let’s grab hold of the message you just sent to yourself. When retrieving mail, most mail clients display a window showing the messages in your mailbox telling you how many new messages have been added.

If you’ve never used your email before, chances are your message window is empty, or contains only one or two messages (usually official messages from the ISP) besides the one you sent to yourself. The message to yourself should be accompanied by an indicator of some sort—a colored mark, the letter N—indicating it’s a new message. In Netscape Communicator, as in other mail clients, you also get to see the date of the message, who sent it, and the information you entered in the subject line. The Subject field lets you scan your messages and determine which ones you want to look at first.

The summary of received messages tells you everything you need to know about a message except what’s in it. Click anywhere in the line to see the contents in the message window. Click on the message from yourself and you’ll see the contents of the message displayed in a window. The information at the top—To, From, Subject, and so forth—is called the header. Depending on your system, you may also see some cryptic lines with terms such as X-Mailer, received by, and id number. Most of the time, there’s nothing in this part of the header of interest, so just skip over it for now.

Moving Forward

The contents, or text, of your message can be cut and pasted just like any other text document. If you and a classmate are working on a project together, your partner can write part of a paper and email it to you, and you can copy the text from your email message and paste it into your word processing program.

What if there are three partners in this project? One partner sends you a draft of the paper for you to review. You like it and want to send it on to your other partner. The Forward feature lets you send the message intact, so you don’t have to cut and paste it into a new message window. To forward a message, highlight it in the Inbox (top) and click the Forward icon. Enter the recipient’s address in the “To” field of the message window. Note that the subject of the message is “Fwd:” followed by the subject of the original message. Use the text window to add your comments ahead of the original message.

Email is not a one-way message system. Let’s walk through a reply to a message from a correspondent named Elliot. Highlight the message in your Inbox again and this time click on the Reply icon. When the message window appears, click on the Quote icon. Depending on which program you’re using, you’ll see that each line in the message is preceded by either a vertical bar or a right angle bracket (>).

Note the vertical line to the left of the original text. The “To” and “Subject” fields are filled in automatically with the address of the sender and the original subject preceded by “Re:”. In Internet terminology, the message has been quoted. The vertical bar or > is used to indicate lines not written by you but by someone else (in this case, the message’s original author). Why bother? Because this feature allows you to reply without retyping the parts of the message you’re responding to. Because your typing isn’t quoted, your answers stand out from the original message. Netscape Communicator 4 adds some blank lines above and below your comments, a good practice for you if your mail client doesn’t do this automatically.

While we’re on the subject of email, here are some netiquette (net etiquette) tips.

When you send email to someone, even someone who knows you well, all they have to look at are your words—there’s no body language attached. That means there’s no smile, no twinkle in the eye, no raised eyebrow; and especially, there’s no tone of voice. What you write is open to interpretation and your recipient has nothing to guide him or her. You may understand the context of a remark, but will your reader? If you have any doubts about how your message will be interpreted, you might want to tack on an emoticon to your message. An emoticon is a face created out of keyboard characters. For example, there’s the happy Smiley :-) (you have to look at it sidewaysthe parenthesis is its mouth), the frowning Smiley :-( (Frownie?), the winking Smiley ;-), and so forth. Smileys are the body language of the Internet. Use them to put remarks in context. “Great,” in response to a friend’s suggestion means you like the idea. “Great :-(” changes the meaning to one of disappointment or sarcasm. (Want a complete list of emoticons? Try using “emoticon” as a key word for a Web search.)

Keep email messages on target. One of the benefits of email is its speed. Reading through lengthy messages leaves the reader wondering when you’ll get to the point.

Email’s speed carries with it a certain responsibility. Its ease of use and the way a messages seems to cry out for an answer both encourage quick responses, but quick doesn’t necessarily mean thoughtful. Once you hit the Send icon, that message is gone. There’s no recall button. Think before you write, lest you feel the wrath of the modern-day version of your parents’ adage: Answer in haste, repent at leisure.

Here’s another tip cum cautionary note, this one about Web security. Just as you take care to protect your wallet or purse while walking down a crowded street, it’s only good practice to exercise caution with information you’d like to keep (relatively) private. Information you pass around the Internet is stored on, or passed along by, computers that are accessible to others. Although computer system administrators take great care to insure the security of this information, no scheme is completely infallible. Here are some security tips:

Exercise care when sending sensitive information such as credit card numbers, passwords, even telephone numbers and addresses in plain email. Your email message may pass through four or five computers en route to its destination, and at any of these points, it can be intercepted and read by someone other than the recipient.

Send personal information over the Web only if the page is secure. Web browsers automatically encrypt information on secure pages, and the information can only be unscrambled at the Web site that created the secure page. You can tell if a page is secure by checking the status bar at the bottom of your browser’s window for an icon of a closed lock.

Remember that any files you store on your ISP’s computer are accessible to unscrupulous hackers.

Protect your password. Many Web client programs, such as mail clients, have your password for you. That means anyone with physical access to your computer can read your email. With a few simple tools, someone can even steal your password. Never leave your password on a lab computer. (Make sure the Remember Password or Save Password box is unchecked in any application that asks for your password.)

Remember that the Web in particular and the Internet in general are communications mediums with a far-reaching audience, and placing information on the Internet is tantamount to publishing it. Certainly, the contents of any message or page you post become public information, but in a newsgroup (an electronic bulletin board), your email address also becomes public knowledge. On a Web page, posting a photo of your favorite music group can violate the photographer’s copyright, just as if you published the image in a magazine. Use common sense about posting information you or someone else expects to remain private; and, remember, information on the Web can and will be read by people with different tastes and sensitivities. The Web tends to be self-censoring, so be prepared to handle feedback, both good and bad.

There’s no reason you can’t use email to create a discussion group. You pose a question, for example, by sending an email message to everyone in the group. Somebody answers and sends the answer to everyone else on the list, and so on.

At least, that’s the theory.

In practice, this is what often happens. As people join and leave the group, you and the rest of your group are consumed with updating your lists, adding new names and deleting old ones. As new people join, their addresses may not make it onto the lists of all the members of the group, so different participants get different messages. The work of administering the lists becomes worse than any value anyone can get out of the group, and so it quickly dissolves.

Generally, you’re better off letting the computer handle discussion group administration. A list server is a program for administering emailing lists. It automatically adds and deletes list members and handles the distribution of messages.

Thousands of mailing lists have already been formed by users with common interests. You may find mailing lists for celebrities, organizations, political interests, occupations, and hobbies. Your instructor may establish a mailing list for your course.

Groups come in several different flavors. Some are extremely active. You can receive as many as forty or more email messages a day. Other lists may send you a message a month. One-way lists, such as printed newsletters, do not distribute your reply to any other subscriber. Some lists distribute replies to everyone. These lists include mediated lists, in which an “editor” reviews each reply for suitability (relevance, tone, use of language) before distributing the message, and unmediated lists, in which each subscriber’s response is automatically distributed to all the other subscribers with no restrictions except those dictated by decency and common sense, though these qualities may not always be obvious from reading the messages.

You join in the discussion by subscribing to a list, which is as straightforward as sending email. You need to know only two items: the name of the list and the address of the list server program handling subscriptions. To join a list, send a Subscribe message to the list server address. The message must contain the letters “Sub,” the name of the list, and your name (your real name, not your user name), all on one line. And that’s all. This message will be read by a computer program that looks for these items only. At the very best, other comments in the message will be ignored. At the very worst, your entire message will be ignored, and so will you.

Within a few hours to a day after subscribing, the list server will automatically send you a confirmation email message, including instructions for sending messages, finding out information about the list and its members, and canceling your subscription. Save this message for future reference. That way, if you do decide to leave the list, you won’t have to circulate a message to the members asking how to unsubscribe, and you won’t have to wade through fifty replies all relaying the same information you received when you joined.

Soon after your confirmation message appears in your mailbox, and depending on the activity level of the list, you’ll begin receiving email messages. New list subscribers customarily wait a while before joining the discussion. After all, you’re electronically strolling into a room full of strangers; it’s only fair to see what topics are being discussed before wading in with your own opinions. Otherwise, you’re like the bore at the party who elbows his way into a conversation with “But enough about you, let’s talk about me.” You’ll also want to avoid the faux pas of posting a long missive on a topic that subscribers spent the preceding three weeks thrashing out. Observe the list for a while, understand its tone and feel, what topics are of interest to others and what areas are taboo. Also, look for personalities. Who’s the most vociferous? Who writes very little but responds thoughtfully? Who’s the most flexible? The most rigid? Most of all, keep in mind that there are far more observers than participants. What you write may be read by 10 or 100 times more people than those whose names show up in the daily messages.

When you reply to a message, you reply to the list server address, not to the address of the sender (unless you intend for your communication to remain private). The list server program takes care of distributing your message listwide. Use the address in the “Reply To” field of the message. Most mail clients automatically use this address when you select the Reply command. Some may ask if you want to use the reply address (say yes). Some lists will send a copy of your reply to you so you know your message is online. Others don’t send the author a copy, relying on your faith in the infallibility of computers.

In the words of those famous late night television commercials, you can cancel your subscription at any time. Simply send a message to the address you used to subscribe (which you’ll find on that confirmation message you saved for reference), with “Unsub,” followed on the same line by the name of the list. For example, to leave a list named “WRITER-L,” you would send:

Unsub WRITER-L

Even if you receive messages for a short while afterwards, have faith—they will disappear.

List servers create an excellent forum for people with common interests to share their views; however, from the Internet standpoint, these lists are terribly wasteful. First of all, if there are one thousand subscribers to a list, every message must be copied one thousand times and distributed over the Internet. If there are forty replies a day, this one list creates forty thousand email messages. Ten such lists mean almost a half million messages, most of which are identical, flying around the Net.

Another wasteful aspect of list servers is the way in which messages are answered. The messages in your mailbox on any given day represent a combination of new topics and responses to previous messages. But where are these previous messages? If you saved them, they’re in your email mailbox taking up disk space. If you haven’t saved them, you have nothing to compare the response to. What if a particular message touches off a chain of responses, with subscribers referring not only to the source message but to responses as well? It sounds like the only safe strategy is to save every message from the list, a suggestion as absurd as it is impractical.

What we really need is something closer to a bulletin board than a mailing list. On a bulletin board, messages are posted once. Similar notices wind up clustered together. Everyone comes to the same place to read or post messages.

The Internet equivalent of the bulletin board is the Usenet or newsgroup area. Usenet messages are copied only once for each ISP supporting the newsgroup. If there are one thousand students on your campus reading the same newsgroup message, there need only be one copy of the message stored on your school’s computer.

Newsgroups are categorized by topics, with topics broken down into subtopics and sub-subtopics. For example, you’ll find newsgroups devoted to computers, hobbies, science, social issues, and “alternatives.” Newsgroups in this last category cover a wide range of topics that may not appeal to the mainstream. Also in this category are beginning newsgroups.

Usenet names are amalgams of their topics and subtopics, separated by dots. If you were interested in a newsgroup dealing with, say, music, you might start with rec.music and move down to rec.music.radiohead, or rec.music.techno, and so forth. The naming scheme allows you to zero in on a topic of interest.

Most of the work of reading, responding to, and posting messages is handled by a news reader client program, accessible through both Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can not only surf the Web and handle your mail via your browser, but you can also drop into your favorite newsgroups virtually all in one operation.

Let’s drop into a newsgroup. To reach groups via Netscape Communicator, select the Message Center icon, then select “news” from the message center window. Your news reader displays a list of available groups. In Netscape Communicator, this list appears in outline form to save space. Click on the arrows next to the folder names to move down the outline (through the categories) to see more groups.

To subscribe to a newsgroup—that is, to tell your news reader you want to be kept up-to-date on the messages posted to a particular group—highlight the group of interest and click on Subscribe. Alternately, you can click in the Subscribe column to the right of the group name. The check mark in the Subscribe column means you’re “in.”

The message center in Netscape Communicator displays a list of newsgroups on your subscription list. Double click on the one of current interest and your reader presents you with a list of messages posted on the group’s bulletin board. Double click on a message to open its contents in a window.

Often, messages contain “Re:” in their subject lines, indicating a response to a previous message (the letters stand for “Regarding”). Many news readers maintain a thread for you. Threads are chains of messages and all responses to that message. These readers give you the option to read messages chronologically or to read a message followed by its responses.

When you subscribe to a newsgroup, your news reader will also keep track of the messages you’ve read so that it can present you with the newest (unread) ones. While older messages are still available to you, this feature guarantees that you stay up-to-date without any record keeping on your part. Subscribing to a newsgroup is free, and the subscription information resides on your computer.

Newsgroups have no way of knowing who their subscribers are, and the same caveat that applies to bookmarks applies to newsgroups. Information about your subscriptions resides physically on the personal computer you’re using. If you switch computers, as in a lab, your subscription information and history of read messages are beyond your reach.

As with list servers, hang out for a while, or lurk, to familiarize yourself with the style, tone, and content of newsgroup messages. As you probably surmised from the names of the groups, their topics of discussion are quite narrow. One of the no-nos of newsgroups is posting messages on subjects outside the focus of the group. Posting off-topic messages, especially lengthy ones, is an excellent way to attract a flaming.

A flame is a brutally debasing message from one user to another. Flames are designed to hurt and offend, and often the target of the flame feels compelled to respond in kind to protect his or her self-esteem. This leads to a flame war, as other users take sides and wade in with flames of their own. If you find yourself the target of a flame, your best strategy is to ignore it. As with a campfire, if no one tends to the flames, they soon die out.

As mentioned earlier, posting messages to newsgroups is a modern form of publishing, and a publisher assumes certain responsibilities. You have a duty to keep your messages short and to the point. Many newsgroup visitors connect to the Internet via modems. Downloading a day’s worth of long postings, especially uninteresting ones, is annoying and frustrating. Similarly, don’t post the same message to multiple, related newsgroups. This is called cross posting, and it’s a peeve of Net citizens who check into these groups. If you’ve ever flipped the television from channel to channel during a commercial break only to encounter the same commercial (an advertising practice called roadblocking), you can imagine how annoying it is to drop in on several newsgroups only to find the same messages posted to each one.

With the huge potential audience newsgroups offer, you might think you’ve found an excellent medium for advertising goods or services. After all, posting a few messages appears analogous to running classified ads in newspapers, only here the cost is free. There’s a name for these kinds of messages—spam. Spam is the junk mail of the Internet, and the practice of spamming is a surefire way to attract flames. The best advice for handling spam? Don’t answer it. Not only does an answer encourage the spammer, but he or she will also undoubtedly put your email address on a list and sell it to other spammers, who will flood your online mailbox with their junk.

Above all, be considerate of others. Treat them the way you’d like to be treated. Do you enjoy having your grammar or word choices corrected in front of the whole world? Do you feel comfortable when someone calls you stupid in public? Do you appreciate having your religion, ethnicity, heritage, or gender belittled in front of an audience? Respect the rights and feelings of others, if not out of simple decency then out of the sanctions your ISP may impose. Although you have every right to express an unpopular opinion or to take issue with the postings of others, most ISPs have regulations about the kinds of messages one can send via their facilities. Obscenities, threats, and spam may, at a minimum, result in your losing your Internet access privileges.

Before accessing email and newsgroup functions, you need to set up or personalize your browser. If you always work on the same personal computer, this is a one-time operation that takes only a few minutes. In it, you tell your browser where to find essential computer servers, along with personal information the Internet needs to move messages for you.

Step 1:Open the Preferences menu. In Netscape Communicator, it’s located under the Edit menu; in Microsoft Internet Explorer, it’s among the icons at the top of the screen.

Step 2:Tell the browser who you are and where to find your mail servers. Your Reply To address is typically the same as your email address, though if you have an email alias you can use it here. Microsoft Internet Explorer has slots for your mail servers in the same window. Your ISP will provide the server names and addresses. Be sure to use your user name (and not your alias) in the “Account Name” field. SMTP handles your outgoing messages, while the POP3 server routes incoming mail. Often, but not always, these server names are the same. Netscape Communicator has a separate window for server names.

Step 3:Tell the browser where to find your news server. Your ISP will furnish the name of the server. Note that in Microsoft Internet Explorer, you specify a helper application to read the news. Now that most computers come with browsers already loaded onto the hard disk, you’ll find that these helper applications are already set up for you.

Step 4:Set your home page. For convenience, you may want your browser to start by fetching a particular page, such as your favorite search site. Or you might want to begin at your school library’s home page. Enter the URL for this starting page in the home page address field. Both Netscape and Microsoft offer the option of no home page when you start up. In that case, you get a blank browser window.

Operating systems such as Mac OS8 and Microsoft Windows 95 offer automated help in setting up your browsers for Web, mail, and newsgroup operation. You need to know the names of the servers mentioned above, along with your user name and other details, such as the address of the domain name server (DNS) of your ISP. You should receive all this information when you open your Internet account. If not, ask for it.

Economics is perhaps the only social science more affected by the information explosion than political science. Never before have so many people had such immediate access to data and information related to the study of government and politics. A major reason for this development is that federal government agencies and branches were quick to offer access to their public operations and information. In addition, scholars began mining the lode of published public documents for valuable material to post on the World Wide Web. State governments followed the federal example and local governments are beginning to parade information about themselves on the Internet. European governments were slower to take up the task, but they have also gained a presence on the Internet. Asian, African, and Latin American governments are beginning to appear as much as their infrastructure and politics allow.

Not long after the U.S. government began making extensive use of the Internet, political parties and candidates were attracted to the opportunity to quickly and cheaply disseminate information. At the same time, individuals realized the value of the Internet as a way to “publish” their own political ideas. Small, geographically dispersed groups of like-minded individuals could publicize their beliefs, actions, and organizations at low cost to a potential audience across the globe.

Political scientists were almost as quick to find the advantages of the information explosion as were the natural scientists. Today, high school students in government classes have access to information that only post-doctoral scholars could read ten years ago. Professors on different continents can quickly and easily discuss teaching and research ideas and developments in their fields. Professional papers—and responses to them—appear online before they appear on paper. And all of this is accessible from faculty offices and dormitory rooms.

Want to read this week’s United States Supreme Court decisions? Find information about political candidates or diplomatic negotiations? The potential is almost as large as your frame of reference and imagination. Who, in 1989, could have imagined anyone outside Moscow’s KGB headquarters reading files on Soviet espionage in the U.S.A.? Now, anyone with access to the World Wide Web can read those files.

If you want to monitor and compare political candidates anywhere in the U.S.A., you can find partisan and non-partisan information on the Web. One of the best sources on candidates, issues, campaigns, and campaign financing is Project Vote Smart, a nonprofit, non-partisan effort to inform the electorate.

Perhaps you would like political information to be more partisan. There’s no lack of that on the Internet. The Christian Coalition’s site is just one example of issue-driven politics in cyberspace. Or maybe you’re more interested the 1996 election in Zambia. Want to find out the latest from Buckingham Palace? Or the White House? Maybe you don’t want to read the most recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, but you’d rather read the U.S. Air Force’s file of decisions made between 1937 and 1975. It’s available. You can also find out about neighborhood political organizations in Minnesota, Virginia, or any other state.

Would you like to join a discussion about the politics of animal rights in the United Kingdom? Or perhaps you’d like to research Green parties in thirty different countries. You could, if you’d rather, sit at your desk and work through the problems of North Carolina’s efforts to attract new business to the state, even though the case study is offered by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Maybe your research goal is to find out which parliamentary districts Tony Blair’s New Labour Party won from John Major’s Conservative Party in the May 1997 elections. Or you might email a question about something in your textbook to its author.

How do you learn to do all these things? Read on. The following pages will soon improve your proficiency in ““surfing the Net.”

Where Seeing Is Not Always Believing

Typical research resources, such as journal articles, books, and other scholarly works, are reviewed by a panel of experts before being published. At the very least, any reputable publisher takes care to assure that the author is who he or she claims to be and that the work being published represents a reasoned and informed point of view. When anyone can post anything in a Web site or to a newsgroup, the burden of assessing the relevance and accuracy of what you read falls to you. Rumors quickly grow into facts on the Internet simply because stories can spread so rapidly that the “news” seems to be everywhere. Because the Internet leaves few tracks, in no time it’s impossible to tell whether you are reading independent stories or the merely same story that’s been around the world two or three times. Gathering information on the Internet may be quick, but verifying the quality of information requires a serious commitment.

Approach researching via the Internet with confidence, however, and not with trepidation. You’ll find it an excellent workout for your critical evaluation skills; no matter what career you pursue, employers value an employee who can think critically and independently. Critical thinking is also the basis of problem solving, another ability highly valued by the business community. So, as you research your academic projects, be assured that you’re simultaneously developing lifelong expertise.

The first tip for successful researching on the Internet is to always consider your source. A Web site’s URL often alerts you to the sponsor of the site. CNN or MSNBC are established news organizations, and you can give the information you find at their sites the same weight you would give to their cablecasts. Likewise, major newspapers operate Web sites with articles reprinted from their daily editions or expanded stories written expressly for the Internet. On the other hand, if you’re unfamiliar with the source, treat the information the way you would any new data. Look for specifics—“66 percent of all voters” as opposed to “most voters”—and for information that can be verified—a cited report in another medium or information accessible through a Web site hosted by a credible sponsor—as opposed to generalities or unverifiable claims. Look for independent paths to the same information. This can involve careful use of search engines or visits to newsgroups with both similar and opposing viewpoints. Make sure that the “independent” information you find is truly independent. In newsgroups don’t discount the possibility of multiple postings, or that a posting in one group is nothing more than a quotation from a posting in another. Ways to verify independent paths include following sources (if any) back to their origins, contacting the person posting a message and asking for clarification, or checking other media for verification.

In many cases, you can use your intuition and common sense to raise your comfort level about the soundness of the information. With both list servers and newsgroups, it’s possible to lurk for a while to develop a feeling for the authors of various postings. Who seems the most authoritarian, and who seems to be “speaking” from emotion or bias? Who seems to know what he or she is talking about on a regular basis? Do these people cite their sources of information (a job or affiliation perhaps)? Do they have a history of thoughtful, insightful postings, or do their postings typically contain generalities, unjustifiable claims, or flames? On Web sites, where the information feels more anonymous, there are also clues you can use to test for authenticity. Verify who’s hosting the Web site. If the host or domain name is unfamiliar to you, perhaps a search engine can help you locate more information. Measure the tone and style of the writing at the site. Does it seem consistent with the education level and knowledge base necessary to write intelligently about the subject?

When offering an unorthodox point of view, good authors supply facts, figures, and quotes to buttress their positions, expecting readers to be skeptical of their claims. Knowledgeable authors on the Internet follow these same commonsense guidelines. Be suspicious of authors who expect you to agree with their points of view simply because they’ve published them on the Internet. In one-on-one encounters, you frequently judge the authority and knowledge of the speaker using criteria you’d be hard pressed to explain. Use your sense of intuition on the Internet, too.

As a researcher (and as a human being), the job of critical thinking requires a combination of healthy skepticism and rabid curiosity. Newsgroups and Web sites tend to focus narrowly on single issues (newsgroups more so than Web sites). Don’t expect to find a torrent of opposing views on newsgroup postings; their very nature and reason for existence dampens free-ranging discussions. A newsgroup on The X-Files might argue about whether extraterrestrials exist but not whether the program is the premier television show on the air today. Such a discussion would run counter to the purposes of the newsgroup and would be a violation of netiquette. Anyone posting such a message would be flamed, embarrassed, ignored, or otherwise driven away. Your research responsibilities include searching for opposing views by visiting a variety of newsgroups and Web sites. A help here is to fall back on the familiar questions of journalism: who, what, when, where, and why.

Who else might speak knowledgeably on this subject? Enter that person’s name into a search engine. You might be surprised to find whose work is represented on the Web. (For fun, one of the authors entered the name of a rock-and-roll New York radio disk jockey into MetaCrawler and was amazed to find several pages devoted to the DJ, including sound clips of broadcasts dating back to the sixties, along with a history of his theme song.)

What event might shed more information on your topic? Is there a group or organization that represents your topic? Do they hold an annual conference? Are synopses of presentations posted on the sponsoring organization’s Web site?

When do events happen? Annual meetings or seasonal occurrences can help you isolate newsgroup postings of interest.

Where might you find this information? If you’re searching for information on wines, for example, check to see if major wine-producing regions, such as the Napa Valley in California or the Rhine Valley in Germany, sponsor Web sites. These may point you to organizations or information that don’t show up in other searches. Remember, Web search engines are fallible; they don’t find every site you need.

Why is the information you’re searching for important? The answer to this question can lead you to related fields. New drugs, for example, are important not only to victims of diseases but to drug companies and the FDA as well.

Approach assertions you read from a skeptic’s point of view. See if they stand up to critical evaluation or if you’re merely emotionally attached to them. Imagine “What if?” or “What about?” scenarios that may disprove or at least call into question what you’re reading. Try following each assertion you pull from the Internet with the phrase, “On the other hand” Because you can’t leave the sentence hanging, you’ll be forced to finish it, and this will help get you into the habit of critically examining information.

These are, of course, the same techniques critical thinkers have employed for centuries, only now you are equipped with more powerful search tools than past researchers may have ever imagined. In the time it took your antecedents to formulate their questions, you can search dozens of potential information sources. You belong to the first generation of college students to enjoy both quantity and quality in its research, along with a wider perspective on issues and the ability to form personal opinions after reasoning from a much wider knowledge base. Certainly, the potential exists for the Internet to grind out a generation of intellectual robots, “thinkers” who don’t think but who regurgitate information from many sources. Technology always has its good and bad aspects. However, we also have the potential to become some of the most well-informed thinkers in the history of the world, thinkers who are not only articulate but confident that their opinions have been distilled from a range of views, processed by their own personalities, beliefs, and biases. This is one of the aspects of the Internet that makes this era such an exciting combination of humanism and technology.

Text Link

Picture Link

Text links are underlined and set of in color. Picture links are set off by a colored border. Hot spots carry no visual identification.

A sample web page to exercise your link identifying skills.

A missing page message, an all too common road hazard on the information superhighway.

We’ll start by searching for the words “internet” or “history.” By looking for “any of the words,” the search will return pages on which either “internet” or “history” or both appear.

Our search returned 12,334,156 matches or hits. Note that the first two items don’t seem to be Internet history­related. The percentage number in the last line of each summary indicates the “quality” of the match, usually related to the number of times the search word(s) appears on the page.

When we conduct the same search, but this time looking for “all the words,” the search returns hits when both “internet” and “history” appear on the same page, in any order, and not necessarily next to each other.

The search is narrowed down to only 885,911 hits. Note that the first four items are the same as in the previous search.

When we search for the exact phrase “history of the internet,” which means those four words in exactly that order, with no intervening words, we’re down to less than 12,000 hits (still a substantial number). This time, the first two hits look dead-on, and the third is a possibility, if we knew what “GTO” meant. The fourth hit is strange, so we click on it to check it out.

This hit seems to have nothing to do with the history of the Internet. Hits happen. No search engine is 100 percent accurate 100 percent of the time. Spurious search results are the serendipity of the Internet. Look at them as an opportunity to explore something new.

You’ll find search tip pages like this at all the major searcch engine sites.

If you’d like some entertaining practice sharpening your Web searching skills, point your browser to <www.internettreasurehunt.com>, follow the directions, and you’re on your way to becoming an Internet researcher extraordinaire.

New message form, with fields for recipient’s address and the subject, and a window for the text of the message.

The closed lock icon in the lower left-hand corner of your browser window indicates a “secure” Web page.

Tile.Net offers shortcuts to working your way through the Internet’s maze of discussion lists.

A listing of posted messages. While not visible from this black and white reproduction, a red indicator in the Subject column marks unread messages.

Double-clicking on a message opens its contents into a window like this. You can reply to this message via the Reply icon, or get the next message using the Next icon.

A small but well-organized Hawaii sovereignty movement creates a formidable presence on the World Wide Web with a combination of technical expertise and public relations skills.