It’s a Small World Wide Web

Does your closet organizer have an Internet bin?

Business periodicals, I’ve noticed, insist that “brash, young entrepreneurs” — they never mention any other kind of entrepreneur — must be “Internet savvy” in order to get ahead. I haven’t the foggiest idea what “Internet savvy” means. I suspect it’s something more than knowing how to scroll down a page, add a bookmark, or make a bid on some eBay gewgaw. Do you need to be familiar with HTML and Java to be Internet savvy, or just hire somebody who is? How much savvy do you really need? Is total savvy of this daunting beast even possible?

In answer to this question, I read in the New York Times that a company called Alexa Internet had rolled up its sleeves, rolled out the measuring tape, and figured out just how big the Internet really is. It’s 3TB, or three trillion bytes of information — equivalent to about 5,000 CD-ROMs. “This cyberspace that people have been romping around in,” the Times noted, “could be squeezed inside a bedroom closet.”

The concept of placing the Internet in my bedroom closet really throws me for a loop. I’d have to remove skeletons, six boxes of old newspaper clippings, and 12 pairs of shoes to make room for it, but it’s theoretically possible. But then I’d have surfers dropping by day and night, double-clicking on my sport coats, getting tangled up in the hangers, flaming each other in little bitty chat rooms — who needs the hassle?

And doesn’t this statistic make the Internet seem, well, a little teeny? For comparison’s sake, the Times pointed out that the “entire Library of Congress has been estimated to contain 20TB of text.” This means, I think, that the Library of Congress could fit in my closet too, if I gave all my clothes to Goodwill.

But even if I could fit these databases into my cramped abode, I couldn’t ignore the whole dystopian side of cyberspace. To itself and the print media, the Internet is a booming, teeming marketplace revolution, an unmediated virtual department store that offers everything, with nothing standing between us and what we desire but the limits of our own savvy. But in popular culture, cyberspace is a fantasy world designed to keep us from realizing that we actually live in an ozone-depleted, blasted, post-apocalyptic wasteland, where our very dreams are controlled by evil robots. In other words, I could have Marc Andreeson and a flow chart in my closet, or Keanu Reeves in black leather and shades blowing away sentient programs with a semiautomatic weapon. Neither option is really appealing.

Here’s another deflating perspective on the Internet: The Wall Street Journal printed a story last April that asked the question, “When the commercial history of the Internet is written, whose names will appear among the chief catalysts? Beyond cyber visionaries, such as America Online founder Steve Case, you could also make a powerful argument for including Pamela Anderson Lee, actress, chronic centerfold, and star of what is now perhaps the world’s best-known home movie.”

Apparently, Ms. Lee is the “Web’s top drawing card,” with close to 150,000 pages featuring her. It “works out to about 0.1 percent of the 150 million Web pages indexed by the Alta Vista search engine….” This portion is small, sure — but the Journal compares it to “…walking into the New York Public Library and finding that 13,300 of the volumes there are written about her.”

Ms. Lee attained her Internet status, of course, through the infamous honeymoon video she made of her and then-husband Tommy Lee. Construction workers allegedly stole this video from her home and pirated it; it eventually made its way all over the Internet. Over 300,000 copies of the video have been sold, and images from it have popped up on pretty much every “adult” link in existence. Even when her image isn’t at a site, her name is sometimes used in its “meta tag,” the invisible code words placed by Web authors in a search engine’s index, just to entice users to visit.

Ms. Lee herself isn’t seeing much money from this activity, joining thousands of other brash, young entrepreneurs lacking Internet savvy. And, as nearly every major media outlet has announced, she is now silicone free as well as silicon challenged. Now that Ms. Lee is keeping a lower profile, so to speak, will her Internet presence diminish, too? Or is she just indulging in a real-world equivalent of data compression?

Whatever her motives, I just hope she doesn’t show up in my closet. Even with her new dress size, frankly, I’m running out of room.

Ian Shoales lives in San Francisco with a garage full of wilted Chia Pets he’s offering for sale. Check out eBay! Make a bid! Email it to him at elrem@mindspring.com.