Wired as all hell

Kill your television. I've seen a lot of these bumperstickers lately, urging me to dropkick the great time-waster through the goalposts of life. No problem. A few months before O.J. was found innocent, back when television news dropped all pretenses of maintaing journalistic integrity and bombarded our lives with up-to-the-minute Juice alerts, I pulled the plug on my television.

I was mad as hell and not going to take it any longer. Besides, why waste my time watching Family Matters when I can waste my time surfing the Web?

Clicking on hyperlinks with my right hand and drinking a domestic beer with my left has the surprising flavor of the remote control shuffle I used to practice so often in days of yore. Natch, Web ads are less intrusive, but the entertainment value of the net is signicantly lower. Sites change at most once a day, sometimes once a week, sometimes even less (such as (cough) this site).

Television change programs every half-hour. Yeah, there's the occasional hour-long show or two-hour special, but with America's short attention span and network executive's hunger for short-term profitiability, we're guaranteed a nice rich viewing experience that tantalizes our more base desires. Blood, flesh, car chases, and plenty of it.

And then there's the Web. Where's the action? Where's the violence? Where's the chicks? Not those with their legs spread up in the air, but the ones running around in bikinis with loaded semi-automatics? Nowhere to be found.

So, let's see what we got ... we got HotWired. No libido-raising visuals here, but if you visit after Friday, you can smirk at their "We do drugs every weekend". Boy, those guys sure are hip!

And they've been cracking those HTML for Dummies books too. HotWired, like its paper counterpart, steeps itself in odd layouts and weird color combinations. (Sure Wired, print your page numbers metallic silver over a yellow background ... only someone as retro as me would bother reading the table of contents and then actually flip right to a page and start reading! Call me an anal-retentive geek, but that's just how I am.
		Dear Wired, Enclosed you'll find a bill for $243.58. This is my optomotrist bill for treatment of color-burned eyes, an ailment common among us that read your rag rather than just carry it around to feel hip about emerging technology. While you're writing the check, please cancel the remainder of my subscription.
		HotWired's got the same damn fascination with day-glo colors, probably the result of too much paste ingested in elementary school. Doesn't matter, though, this is award-winning stuff. They've got everything for everyone. Literature reviews, music updates, an HTML-brandishing bartender for those of the alcoholically-inclined, and their own spiffy Web page o' the week (now there's an original idea). Kind of a cross between Details and Spin ... on the Web!
	No wait, that's not being fair. HotWired's a serious magazine. If you visit Netizen you'll find hard-cutting commentary is literally boiling out of their ears. Netizen completes the repressed nerd's onanistic dream. HotWired has made geekdom hip, trendy, cool -- and important.		How important? Important in the political spectrum. Used to be that the jocks and cheerleaders went on to run multinational corporations and take corrupt positions in the Federal goverment and the nerds were delegated to low-paying jobs in Southern California designing thermonuclear warheads. No more! Representation is finally ours, with illuminaries like Katz and Heilemann at our side. Netizen watches Washington, the primaries, and the courts with an eagle eye. So, maybe HotWired's a cross between Details, Spin, and New Republic. But with all the articles trimmed down as buffered easy-to-swallow chunks of edited prose, maybe it's just a hip Reader's Digest on a neonic acid trip.
HotWired thinks they've mastered the New Media. All they've really done is mastered HTML.	Except that it's not a magazine. HotWired is Way New, if you believe the editorial spew they gurgle up whenever someone will listen. "We rejected the magazine metaphor from the beginning", Gary Wolf brags. "Today we are further away from the magazine metaphor than ever." How? I don't see it. They've got a a travel section, a groovy health column with a doctor that could've jammed on stage with Garcia, and an entertainment guide. So, where's the revolutionary stuff? Oh -- they review zines. Well, there's the Way New journalism. Watch me pipe music into a party line where anyone can dial their phone to listen -- and then watch me declare that I've rejected the broadcast radio metaphor. Sorry Charlie ... it's just Your Hit Parade with crummier fidelity.
	The analogy rings true because not only has HotWired embraced the magazine metaphor, they've transplanted it to a worse interface. Wired's color-madness aside, holding a magazine in hand is a comfortable interface. Page flipping doesn't require a two-button mouse, and the RAM requirements are minimal. Reading HotWired over a lousy 14-inch VGA display in a hard office chair with U2 squeaking out of two lousy "multimedia" speakers -- forget it. Actually, I can't believe I'm still sitting here writing this. My butt's fallen to sleep. HotWired thinks they've mastered the New Media. All they've really done is mastered HTML.
Lately, however, HotWired's found a new horse to beat. CDA, Senator Exon, crypto ... these are tiddlywinks compared to the new threat: Slate. The much-publicized brainchild of Michael Kinsley, Microsoft has toed HotWired's turf, and in a big way. Sure, Gary Wolf seems to welcome their presence with open arms, but apparently not everyone on the staff is so congenial. Take Jon Katz's three-part series on why Slate misses the point. Jon picks on the easy stuff ... Slate's roots to The New Republic. The Way Old journalism. The obvious Ivy League inspired content. Okay, so Slate's not some cyberpunk tres' chic ezine for the hip-to-be-square masses . But, incredibly, Katz suggests that Slate is a little tough on the eyes:
"... confusing graphics take the average Web surfer inordinate time to read, scroll, and print, while the accompanying affectations - music, video clips - are mostly adornments, rather than editorial complements. They serve no function other than to shout, 'Hey, look! We have cool stuff, too.'"		Jiminy Crickets! Is Katz complaining about Slate or the hand that feeds? Slate is Eastern Establishment Harvard white-bred white bread journalism. But what Katz can't seem to comprehend is that this is exactly what Kinsley set out to create. Katz is convinced that Way New journalism is Way Only journalism. Couldn't Slate's stolid material be just that -- casual reading? (But is Slate really as flaccid as Katz leads on? For crissakes, Slate's first issue asked "Is Microsoft Evil?" And those in favor of the motion got some good licks in.) Between the lines, Katz's remarks are tinged with a bit of jealousy. After all, Slate is well-financed, well-staffed, and well-advertised, right out of the gate. It took Wired Enterprises an exhausting twelve months to possess all those luxuries. I think the bitterness emanating from Netizen is just the taste of sour grapes. Maybe all the celebration wine turned to vinegar after Wired's IPO went south -- and it went south not too long after Slate hit the streets. Could it be that Way New journalism means ignoring conflict-of-interests when you're banging out a five hundred word editorial?
	Slate's presence on the Web is party-crashing, plain and simple. But Katz relishes the chaotic nature of the net and is convinced that Kinsley's brand of journalism -- polo shirts, khakis, sweater sleeves hanging over the shoulder -- proves he's an HTTP poseur. Consider Slate's lack of Usenet-style threads: "...there are certainly none of those tacky public brawls on Slate, either. Interactivity is just another cyberpose to Kinsley ... Of course, the absence of interactivity is the common characteristic of the very media Slate is copying so deliberately." Actually, it's the common characteristic of paper and broadcast media, where information delivery is technologically postured for a one-to-many relationship. Check out Wired's letters page -- not real interactive, eh? Is every print magazine supposed to junk their paper presses in the East River and go 100% HTML? What the hell am I supposed to read on the plane -- where dialup will cost you three bucks a minute and carrier tone is verboten during lift-off or landing? Katz doesn't find Slate at fault. He obviously thinks that the source of the problem is Kinsley. But Katz, trying to throw some mud around, just winds up slipping and falling in it himself. He bashes Kinsley for dissing the Web's self-important attitude, and then cops a Way New attitude himself. He blunts Kinsley for coining the word "cyberia" to describe the Web and then coins a few new phrases just for fun. Katz says that Kinsley is Way Old journalism, but I've yet to see a good explanation of the Way New variety. Why do I get the feeling the writers at HotWired spend more time preening over their incredible grasp of the Internet than they do observing it? Gutenberg didn't just throw his feet up and pat himself on the back for a job well done. He got busy pumping out Bibles.
Slate's just not up to snuff. Katz wants interactivity, dammit. HotWired wants interactivity too -- at the bottom of each page is a teaser question to lure you into the den of wolves, the ominous threaded message section. Speak your mind! Speak your peace! We're listening. Too bad Katz admits that unfettered communication isn't all it's cracked up to be. He's not admitting defeat, but he concedes that the anonymity of the Internet has a tendency to bring out the worst in people. I can sum up his feelings with fewer words: the signal-to-noise ratio in Usenet (and in HotWired's Threads) sucks. Not convinced? Then why was Netizen's hellspawned wild-child GEEK Force put to sleep? Whaddya know -- a user-formed coalition to deter net regulation just couldn't get past the predictable bickering and infighting. It's the electronic embodiment of high school bathroom graffiti: "Anarchists unite!!"

Part two: Wiping the Slate