A New Book On Cyberspace Is Hopelessly Self-Absorbed. By Dan Parslow Deeper: My Two Year Odyssey in Cyberspace, by John Seabrook Simon and Schuster. Hardcover, $25. IN DEEPER, subtitled My Two Year Odyssey in Cyberspace, New Yorker columnist John Seabrook embarks on a mission of discovery into the much-hyped electronic frontier, and credits his journey with two antecedents: Francis Parkman, Jr. of The Oregon Trail and the inward-turning easterner Henry David Thoreau. Reflecting this, the author divides the book into two sections respectively titled "West" and "East." But the narrative doesn't really fit this division; it's a strictly linear, diaristic record of his introduction to the online world, a stepped transition from "newbie" to "net hand" that textually isn't divided where he divides it. The result seems imposed and artificial, a seemingly retroactive attempt to fit unwilling text to some overarching high-concept frame. The explorer motif falters a bit in its particulars: In his westward trek Parkman was not preceded by millions of intrepid souls, nor did he have quite the succession of friendly experts that Seabrook calls upon to both light and pave his way into the new lands. More apt and perhaps more telling is the invocation of Thoreau, who occupied a terrain with few overt mysteries remaining and used it as a contemplative base. Unfortunately, the influence is primarily visible in a kind of stylistic imprinting that is by turns disjointed and parodical. An example of the latter is this awkward and mystifyingly detailed construction: "I pushed my padded faux corduroy chair away from my desk (by placing my two hands on the edge of my desk and pushing), and I looked around my room." Seabrook's outward journey consists of a linear progression of steps in which he adopts the pieces of this other reality in reasonably logical stages: E-mail, bulletin boards, newsgroups, online chat, web, homepage. Interspersed are glosses on cyber-history of the sort that Time and Newsweek have been delighting in since the middle of 1995. To his credit, he takes the comparatively rare step of acknowledging the preexistence of the small island communities of private bulletin boards, often neglected in Net histories in favor of its grander military/academic background. But the inward journey doesn't go anywhere at all: It consists of a relentless self-absorption that permeates the book and is, all unknowingly, its real subject. Seabrook is manifestly sensitive, and the narrative is substantially a literal blow-by-blow account of the things that caused him distress. Every online experience, from his first ever e-mail to the metaphorical homesteader's apotheosis in a personal web site, is exhaustively plumbed for its emotional cargo. A great deal of the book is given over to his first experience of being "flamed," that is, sent an inflammatory and abusive e-mail message. We are treated to the message itself, admittedly a masterpiece of the poison pen, many pages of his agonies over it and transcriptions of his conversations with others about it. Twinges of its lasting pain are served up at intervals for the remainder of the book's two-year span. By itself this intimation of vulnerability would convey some useful immediacy, but it and others like it recur, in endlessly belabored rehash, until in one bizarre moment he states that tears came to his eyes and the reader looks in vain for some proximate cause. If he extended this sensitivity to others, one could find him sympathetic and give him credit for documenting the human impact of cyberspace. The trouble is, he doesn't. A succession of other people are encountered both online and IRL (the infonaut abbreviation for In Real Life), but with rare exceptions these individuals are depicted purely as being helpful or hostile to himself. They are surfaces and influences upon the author, and when they leave the stage one has little sense of them as people with thoughts and feelings of their own. Much discussed is The Well, a venerable and highly regarded Bay Area online service which predates the Web by several years. In the politesse of its subscribers, a person, man or woman, is a "pern," an age-and-gender-neutral word meant to render stereotyping difficult. In Seabrook's hands it becomes a term of dehumanization, a kind of code word for that which speaks to him in cyberspace, has the power to please or wound, but is in the end simply an online artifact. He thinks hard upon the words of his correspondents, strains to read between the lines, occasionally fantasizes about them or casts them in his personal archetypes, but none are explored as individuals and ultimately all are characterized entirely in terms of how they treated him. Remarkably, this trait does not go unremarked by those who encounter the author, and their comments are preserved along with all the other examples of praise and its opposite bestowed upon him in his journeys. Of his New Yorker articles which led to this book, one pern on The Well writes: "...Seabrook has absorbed, and communicated, a lot of what needs to be communicated; he just communicates it in a painfully uninteresting and self-centered way." Seabrook's response to this is to go outside and walk off his rage. There is more like this and harsher, but no indication that he thought to treat it all as anything but a succession of unwarranted attacks. Had he taken the advice to heart, he might have written a quite different book. For in the end it's as though Seabrook doesn't realize what book he has written: a portrait rather than a landscape. It depicts the sadly common experience of too many Net users who look to it as an instrument of validation rather than a conduit of human contact, and its denizens largely as mirrors, flawed or flattering, of one's projected persona. If the Infobahn is about making connections with others, going Deeper into self-involvement was the wrong direction to take. In cyberspace as In Real Life, the true adventure begins when you emerge.

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