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 If you want to
share your favourite hobbyhorse and it’s a bit obscure or just plain
bizarre, where do you rustle up your audience? If you’re lucky, you
might locate one or two people in your city with the same arcane
interest, but if you want to broadcast your enthusiasm more widely to
other like-minded souls, how much is it going to cost and how many
readers can you expect anyway? And how do you market your product to
best effect?
Your chances of
finding fellow enthusiasts would be patently far greater, wouldn’t
they, if only you could reach the whole planet? Well, now you can — by
publishing on the Internet. And once your Web site is up and running it
will be there all day, every day, accessible to all. Thousands of people
are learning this lesson every week. Hence the myriad sites maintained
with dedicated single-mindedness by amateur devotees of everything under
the sun, as well as those sites established with equally narrow focus by
serious professional bodies like Project Gutenberg (publishing
electronic versions of out-of-copyright literary classics) or the SETI
Institute (looking for extraterrestrial intelligence).
Naturally this
freedom has given rise to some remarkable material, as the mainstream
press loves to warn us. No doubt you’ve heard of concern about
Internet sites giving advice on bomb building and other terrorist
techniques, and sites offering that everlasting curse of the thought
police, pornography. But not to panic: all that nasty stuff is a tiny
fraction of what’s available.
(A little aside
on the new censorship implications of the Net. You will be aware of the
conviction of the editors of the La Trobe Uni newspaper Rabelais
for an article in the July 1996 issue called The Art of Shoplifting,
which issue now cannot by law be distributed in Victoria. But did you
know that in his programme The National Interest ABC RN’s Terry
Lane recently told listeners how to get the banned article via the
Internet? FOI, yeah.)
Anyway, when I
referred to “remarkable material”, I was thinking more of those
sites on ufology, vampires, conspiracy theories, the millennium, etc.,
as well as the innumerable fan sites panting over the gorgeous passion
of the month – Elle Macpherson, David Duchovny, Ellen deGeneres, John
Cleese . . .
All that said,
however, this is the thing I like most about the Net: the democratic
opportunity it gives us all to be creators instead of consumers — to
publish our fancies, serious or playful, at a modest cost. And these
days, with user-friendly software to help us get our pet ideas out there
in a half presentable manner, anyone can have a bash.
Let me give you a
personal example of how the Internet came in handy, thanks to someone
else’s obsession. It started when I saw a mail-order catalogue blurb
for Wallace Reyburn’s Flushed with Pride: the Story of Thomas
Crapper:
“The
remarkable story of Thomas Crapper, inventor a century ago of the
flushing lavatory and eventually plumber by appointment to King Edward
VII.”
Like
you, my thoughts dashed to the question whether Mr. Crapper had given
his name to a four-letter word. According to
Harlish Goop, the age of
the word “crap” (from the Middle English “crappe”, meaning “chaff”),
quickly puts paid to that idea, though the name “Crapper” (a variant
of “Cropper”) may perchance be related to it, albeit from long ago.
Wiser but
disappointed, I wondered if the Net had anything on the book, or perhaps
even on T. C. Well, one Adam Hart-Davis has an on-line magazine called Science
and Technology Heros [sic], which deals with characters like Richard
Arkwright, John Dalton, Henry Bessemer, etc. Though it costs money to
read every issue, guess who’s there for free, with plenty of detail
about his life and work? (Incidentally, Mr. Crapper was famous for
manhole covers as well as loos, and one of his manhole covers is in
Westminster Abbey, in the cloisters near the deanery.)
And the upshot of
Adam’s painstaking research into lavatory patents? It seems that
though he did register six other plumbing patents, and did install many
loos for the Royals, Crapper did not invent the siphonic flush. So much
for the reliability of Reyburn’s book.
More
disappointment, but at least I’ve saved twenty dollars.
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