"Can you imagine how surreal it must be to roll out of bed in the morning, turn on your computer and watch people from all over the world discuss every intimate detail of your personal life? It sounds like the beginning of a Douglas Adams novel."
It might be the beginning of his next novel, for this is how Adams occasionally starts his day--by surfing through alt.fan.douglas-adams on the Internet (where the above posting was found).
I'd been looking forward to interviewing the 42-year-old "futuristic Mark Twain," author of the now-famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Adams wrote the book when he was only 27, and since then more than 15 million copies have been sold. The London resident and his wife, Jane, recently had a baby girl (Adams posted this message to his newsgroup: "In the womb she acquired the nickname 'Rocket' ") and announced her birth by saying, "Her name is Polly Jane Adams. ... She's long and slim and incomprehensibly beautiful."
Unfortunately, my first encounter with Adams was to become a cyberspace screw-up After e-mailing a request for an interview, promptly receiving a "yes" and e-mailing again for a time and date, I heard nothing. My deadline grew nearer. My editor grew bellicose. Finally, thinking Adams was avoiding me, I dim-wittedly flamed him.
Several days later I got this e-mail response: Douglas Adams' earlier reply, including his treasured phone number, had apparently been lost in cyberspace. True to his word, he'd still grant the interview, but now was "less inclined to do so." With a large serving of egg on my face, I phoned his London flat, and after apologizing profusely, asked the following:
Q: Your e-mail address is available to one and all. Are you often
flamed? And again, I apologize.
A: Really, it's OK. Occasionally, but it's no big deal. Being flamed is,
what, the verbal equivalent of a drive-by shooting? It's unpleasant, but
on the Internet, there's no blood. You live to use cyberspace another
day. Now, I wouldn't want anyone to have my private address or telephone
number, because then people could get at me. But an e-mail address is
safe. It allows you to be accessible while still protecting yourself.
You can say what you want and nobody can physically attack you.
Q: I take it you spend a lot of time logged on.
A: Only if I've got lots of pressing work, deadlines, things like that
[he laughs]. I'm kidding, Though I communicate by writing books and
other things, I think, why not just communicate directly? So I log on,
and hours go by.
Q: Where do you hang out on the net?
A: Well, that depends where the interesting stuff is. Recently, I've
been around anthropologist and paleontologist groups. I regularly check
on an acoustic guitar newsgroup, as well as my own newsgroup.
Occasionally I go look at Pink Floyd's newsgroup, because Nick Mason and
Dave Gilmour are very good friends of mine.
Q:, Do you ever use emoticons such as those smiley faces when you chat?
A: Actually once, and then I was very embarrassed doing so.
Q: Embarrassed?
A: It made me self-conscious; it didn't seem the natural thing to do.
Part of that probably has to do with being very much a product of
Cambridge. I mean, English graduates can't let go of syntax. Maybe it's
snobbery. You know, if Keats didn't do it, you can't do it.
Q: Do you ever lurk?
A: I post on certain newsgroups and when a topic that interests me dies
away, I lurk.
Q: Only when it dies away?
A: Well, then I wait for something else to appear. For instance, I lurk
in that acoustic guitar newsgroup in hopes of finding, well, something
interesting about acoustic guitars.
Q: From your experience on the net, do you see this medium evolving?
Evolution appears to be a topic that interests you.
A: I have lots of thoughts about evolution. About six years ago I wrote
a book called Last Chance To See. It concerned a zoology expedition I
went on and our subsequent search for endangered species. Now,
scientists have been aware of the processes of evolution for many years.
They can see them right now on the Internet, which in my opinion is
going through a natural, Darwinian evolution.
Q: As in "survival of the fittest?"
A: Well, "fittest" carries connotations that are misleading. "Survival
of that which fits" is, think, what is meant. For instance, those
surviving on the Titanic probably happened to be closest to the
lifeboat.
Q: So those of us who will survive the '90s will be closest to an
Internet access?
A: Well, possibly. Here's an evolutionary analogy of what I mean: After
several generations, an animal tends to react to its environment by
growing buffers. For instance, in the cold it will probably develop a
thicker coat. But when we're cold, we spot an animal who has a coat and
takes it off him. In other words, we don't grow buffer zones; we create
or invent them Well, right now, we're wiring up the channels of
communication to make a virtual epidermis of a buffer zone. With the
Internet, we're forming a nervous system over our entire culture.
There's never been anything like it.
Q: Will this buffer zone make us more or less humane?
A: That's very hard to answer. The same question can be asked about the
telephone. Has the telephone made us more humane? Better people?
Q: Will the Internet help us feel closer to each other?
A: Another hypothetical. I imagine it might. The Internet will
certainly forge different connections between people that otherwise
wouldn't have existed-connections based on other then proximity. But
will this ennoble us? Those kind of questions put me in mind of Robert
Axelrod's experiments in modeling societies on computer. Whatever new,
nice thing you put in is often countered by something not so nice. In
fact, the answer to almost any question you can ask about the Internet
is that it's all probably more complicated than "good" and "bad."
Q: Do you ever use other identities on the net?
A: No. I use my own name, and there's a reason. When I first started
communicating on the Internet, I got lot of people sending me notes
saying , "You are not him. You're an impostor," and so on. Really, it
was hard to convince people that I was the real thing. Then somebody
pretended to be me and sent off a bunch of abusive letters. I was quite
bothered about that, as you might imagine. But you can trace where a
note comes from, if you carefully read the address--where it's posted
from and so forth. So subterfuge really doesn't work, and gradually
people began to realize this impostor wasn't me. When people understand
and get comfortable with the technology, can read the addresses and see
where things originate, these kinds of problems, and any need for a
disguise, should disappear.
Q: Does e-mail free us in some way? Is sending e-mail a new form of
displaying one's emotions?
A: Absolutely. And it's a good thing too. When I write, I do all sorts
of editing, but when I e-mail, I just jot down my thoughts and send them
off. It's emotionally liberating. There's another positive about this
kind of communication. Social historians have complained that the
history of the 20th century will be very difficult because we have no
letters. People have been phoning and so forth, so there's no real
record. But if all this e-mail is kept, a wealth of information will be
available to sift through and explore.
Q: Are people keeping their e-mail?
A: I keep mine. Looking back at e-mail I've saved I usually find tons of
ideas that are very interesting.
Q: Would you share your best and worst Internet experiences with me?
A: I think the impostor thing was probably the worst. Also, I suppose--
this isn't a very interesting answer--abusive e-mail, telling me my
books are crap. This kind of stuff affects me depending upon how
vulnerable my mood is, if I've had a bad day. Mostly I've had good
experiences. I love the sense of responsiveness the Internet brings. I
made a decision awhile ago to do another book on endangered species, so
I put a request on a conservation list, if anybody had information that
I should be pointed toward. Well, I got a flood of stuff back, lists of
particular animals, suggestions of where and what to look for. It was
amazing. Here I had generated dialogues with people all around the
world. And it started just with a question. Which is kind of like the
intellectual equivalent of casual sex, don't you think?
Q: Could you elaborate on that?
A: No, as it's been so many years since I've had the experience of
casual sex. But seriously, about that experience with the Internet,
well, I was really moved. It made me wonder how I could have done any of
my work beforehand. It left me with this sensation of being handed
around the world by supportive, friendly, helpful people.
Q: Sounds like a quintessential Internet experience.
A: Yes, I suppose it is. Yes, it is.