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John Seabrook, Deeper (Simon & Schuster, 1997) Reissued in paperback by Touchstone Books in 1998. Journalist John Seabrook kept a two-year diary of his online experiences at a time when the Internet was moving beyond the dingy research labs of well-funded universities and just beginning to make inroads into public life. Seabrook imagines himself, like Meriweather Lewis or Jacques Cousteau, an explorer of a brave new world, and explains the esoterica of the Web (email, listservs, and chat rooms, circa 1995) as if they were wondrous new lands. Of course, back then they were. Today the book is of historical interest, although some readers may find Seabrook's enthusiastic tone and use of Internet typography and iconography a bit too florid. According to Seabrook's publisher, Simon & Schuster, the book tanked. Michael Skube, writing in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, quotes Seabrook: "Because the book was about the Net, a pop-culture subject, the publisher had been persuaded that Deeper would be a popular megastore commodity, maybe even a bestseller, and I had been paid a large advance to write the book ... [but] I had produced a book that was neither a high brow literary work nor low brow guide to the Net, but some unmarketable combination of categories: the dreaded tweener." Seabrook also writes for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and has written often on the marketing of culture and society's appetite for schlock. His book Deeper illustrates the odd ecotone occupied by the Internet circa 1995 –- popular buzzword, nerdy frontier, not quite understood or digestible by the masses. MORE: John Seabrook’s Web site |
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