Page:Untangling the Web.pdf/13



One wag has suggested that the Internet is an "electronic Boswell," the chronicler of our age. It is that and more because the Internet chronicles not only a time and place but all times and all places, known and unknown, real and imaginary. The Internet is the closest thing to the fantastical "Aleph" imagined by the great Argentine story-teller Jorge Luis Borges, an object whose diameter is "little more than an inch" but which nonetheless contains all space, "actual and undiminished," and in which one can see "every angle of the universe."

While the comparison with the mythical Aleph may strike you as a bit whimsical, it is in fact not an altogether unfair metaphor. There has never been anything that approaches the Internet's reach (to almost every part of the' globe in less than thirty years), its size (estimated at 532,897 terabytes way back in 2003 ), and its ability to link us together in a new kind of world community (words, pictures, sounds, ideas beyond imagining). But, as with all new technologies, it comes at a cost-many costs, in fact. We pay for the benefits of the Internet less in terms of money and more in terms of the currencies of our age: time, energy, and privacy.

The goal of this book is to help you save some of each of these valuable resources: time, by making your searches more efficient; energy, by reducing the frustration using the Internet often entails; and privacy, by pointing out some simple measures to take to lower your cyber-profile and enhance your security.

I cannot emphasize strongly enough that this book was already out of date by the time it was published. Even though I have checked and rechecked every link in this book, some addresses are bound to have changed, some sites will have shut down, and some tips and techniques—such as search engine rules and syntax—will no longer be accurate. This is a testament to the changeable nature of the Internet and I must beg your forbearance for any such errors. Writing about the Internet is much like trying to catch Proteus as with the mythical prophet, it keeps changing and escaping our grasp. Rh