For those interested in the impact of the Internet as a technology and as a social metaphor, this anthology has much to recommend it. The authors grapple with fundamental issues of intelligibility in computing, the arts, and society. The Internet, email, bulletin boards, and the Web are shaking things up from top to bottom. Not a mere tool, the technology is a defining frame or framework. This is an important message.

Marcus’s introduction points out that we are undergoing a crisis of representation: the means (in other words, the media) available to express current events, and our selves in response to them--genocide, modern plague, civil insurrection, and destruction of the environment--are fundamentally inadequate. Meanwhile, the Internet, a bastion of individualism, provides an alternative medium for expression of being connected in the service of shared humanity. Written at the moment that electronic commerce is about to hit critical mass, this volume embraces the Internet as a metaphor and a representational medium, and attempts to represent in a print medium--the book--the unconventional, quasi-unstructured, dynamic form of cyberspace itself. In attempting the impossible (like all artifacts with artistic merit) this collection changes our perception of the Internet.

The first essay, “The Electronic Vernacular,” by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, collects reminders of the virtual community: the virtual shtetl (the rural, Yiddish village of pre–World War II eastern Europe) and its destruction, the diaspora; planetwide email; discussion groups; and news lists. In continuing the work of Howard Rheingold on virtual communities [1], she is practicing virtual anthropology. The Talmud, already a labyrinth of interconnected narratives, becomes a hypertext.

What this means is clarified by the second essay, “A Torn Page,” by Ron Burnett. Hypertext is a means of connecting texts that are hot-linked together so that their structural sequence moves from horizontal succession to vertical simultaneity. The distinction between reader and writer is blurred, as the path through the text contributes to the definition of the text itself. Readers will be challenged by this concept of a text as hypermedia.

Other essays explore media of all kinds from the perspective of metaphors and representations of connectivity, virtuality, and hypermedia inspired by the Internet. Notable among these are Christopher Pound’s explicit debunking of the Internet in “Framed”; Mazyar Lotfalian’s “A Tale of an Electronic Community,” distinctive for its side-by-side typographical printing of two hypertextually related proceedings (probably unintelligible unless you realize it is inspired by Heidegger’s concept of “Gestell,” or “enframing” of the world through a human perspective [2]); Meg McLagan’s account of Buddhist monks’ use of the power of connectivity for the pro-democracy movement, in “Computing for Tibet: Virtual Politics in the Post-Cold War Era”; Joe Austin on graffiti as hypertext in “Rewriting New York City”; Kim Laughlin on “Representing Bhopal”; and Ruth Elizabeth Teer-Tomeselli on South Africa’s Democracy Education Broadcast Initiative, in “DEBI Does Democracy.” In this last case, the medium used is video, but video deployed in the spirit of the Net, being digital, and multimedia connectivity.

Despite its academic bent, the assembled collection misses the one connecting footnote that documents the first use of the term “cyberspace,” in the work of the science fiction writer William Gibson, whose 1986 novel Neuromancer foresaw an Internet-like matrix in the context of a corporate dystopia. Still, the collection delivers by documenting a reversal in the erosion of the written word at the hands of video media (especially network TV), and then demonstrates the resurgence of text as hypertext, an enhanced text that guides and frames a variety of other multimedia contents.