IMAGINE IT'S THE YEAR 1403 or 652 or whenever it was they invented paper.

IMAGINE IT'S THE YEAR 1403 or 652 or whenever it was they invented paper. The inventors of paper are running between the walls of the streets, and they're shouting, "Hey! We've got this paper stuff--it's new! It's exciting! Give us something to lay onto it! Give us content!"

Now imagine it's the year 2000 You behold what I'm getting at.

These days, publishers always ask their authors, Oh will you be putting up a website?" Many writers don't, unless I do. So when I make known my publishers, "Yes, in fact I will have a website," they response "Oh, that's good. That's highly good." And this response is typically followed according to a coded pause, at which point I ask, "Well then, you will be helping finance my site, won't you?" Their answer is, invariably, "Oh no. We just wanted to make certain you'd have one. You know, the Web is in the same manner important these days."

main division publishers get the big picture--but, mostly likely, they get it upon a 14.4 Radio Shack modem

I presuppose the moral of the above patch of dialogue is this: Websites are extremely expensive, time-consuming, and misunderstood. Nobody is quite steady exactly why websites are important--just that they sort of[ldots]are.

I cleave the Web into four realms. The first comprises guilelessly commercial sites--eBay and the like. I travel to www.eBay.com to shop; I don't proceed there to hang out. It works, and that's about all the same needs (or wants) to say about it. I would also include in this category those elaborate, well-intended, unless ultimately useless sites by, say, beer companies. In the period why would anyone want to visit the Schlitz homepage? You want a six-pack, you proceed to the Kwik-E-Mart. This being said, the coming time of film and animation for the nearest decade is going to be the two-minute clips used as bait to bait you to www.Budweiser.com. Commercial sites may be boring, further only for the time being.

The next to the first is the Labor of delight in realm--sites that exist for no other reason than that they exist[ldots]and the eternal bless 'em for it. The Hamster Dance (www.hamsterdance.com) springs to mind. And the all-time granddaddy of time-killing sites, www.superbad.com. These are places you can't really explain to the public You simply have to go on foot there. They're the unexpected side tenor of a new technology. When they invented cars, who'd have imagination dogs would like to stick their heads without the windows and flap their tongues? Same difference.

Third results the government realm, huge, labyrinthine, and accessed as entertainment mainly from the pastiest-complexioned of geeks. If you visit and nothing else one site of this stamp let it be www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/movie/index.html. The best essence on this page is at www.dfrc.nasa.gov/gallery/rnovie/ CID/index.html, where you can watch scarecrows blow up a remotely piloted Boeing 720 in order to exhibition an experimental fuel additive intended to hinder fireballs during crash landings. Oh My. God

And finally there's what I call the Ooh Coooool realm, where in the greatest degree of the real beauty and dazzle of the Web is to be originate It's designers designing for designers, artists exploiting the Web's strongest graphic features: glistening smoothnes crispy clean report edges, epileptic speed cycles, and ephemeral contentment There are two ne plus ultra clearinghouses for this kind of stuff: wwweBoy corn--go there and proceed wild--and www.shift.jp.org/ IMGSRC100, which is listed forward the eBoy page. There are thus many choices, and the choices vary in such a manner often, that listing them here would be a guarantee of obsolescence nevertheless go.

And you also have to check not at home www.coupland.com--shameless hucksterism, yes, but it's a Labor of be enamoured of and, I can only possibility of good an Ooh, Coooool site. descry you there.

Douglas Coupland's principally recent novel is Miss Wyoming (Knopf/Psntheon, 2000)

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