He’s a Shining Star Among the Crowded Marketplace of Ideas

Because of the Internet, everyone who has access to a computer and a modem can be now a publisher.

All it takes is a modest fee to establish a site on the World Wide Web, a bit of noodling around with software to design a home page and voila, you too can create a publication with a potential readership worldwide. It’s democracy at its best.

Unfortunately, it’s also, all too often, reading at its worst. The vast majority of personal home pages on the WWW are vapid, boring and (except for those that are offensive), eminently forgettable.

Thankfully, there are exceptions. One of the best is the aptly named “Interesting Ideas,” the home page of Chicagoan Bill Swislow. His ideas mostly involve pop culture, which he takes very seriously.

On “Nancy,” his favorite comic strip: “Most comic strips are simply lame while trying desperately to be otherwise. ‘Nancy’ caved the form in on its absolute essence.”

On characters played by one of his favorite actors, Don Knotts: “Physically and emotionally, they are subject to every bump and eddy of the human intercourse around them, until they worry so much about it all that they become oblivious to anything outside the overstimulation of their imaginations.”

And on Bert, of “Sesame Street” fame: “His weird hobbies not only highlight the patheticism of acquisitiveness, but also demonstrate an absorption in marginalia that is geekdom’s defining feature.”

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Obviously, this is not the usual cyberchatter.

“I think that ‘Nancy’ is wonderful, but ‘Nancy’ is also sort of kitschy and tacky in a lot of ways,” said Swislow, speaking from the Chicago Tribune, where his day job is helping to create the newspaper’s Internet site. “And I do know what some people think of Don Knotts, but that doesn’t keep me from thinking he is an important actor.”

Swislow paused for a moment. “The people behind me are laughing,” he explained.

Swislow is the first to admit that his ideas deviate from mainstream thinking. But that’s what makes the Internet a perfect forum for them. “I had all these cranky thoughts, and most of them too cranky for newspapers,” Swislow said. “On the Web, I had an outlet.”

One of the best parts of his site are his photographs of wonderful, homemade street signs in Chicago and of roadside buildings and other structures that have gone to ruin.

Swislow has a knack for finding wonder in the commonplace, and he has the design and writing skills to present his views in a compelling way on the Web. But why does he do it? No one is paying him to put his ideas in cyberspace and he gets no royalties.

“It’s for fame,” he deadpanned. “I would never be able to afford to publish my photographs or even my writings in print, and even if I did, how many people would I actually get them to? This way, the fantasy is that there are 10 million people out there who could see my pages.”

If you want to see them, the address is https://www.mcs.net/billsw/home.html.

* Cyburbia’s e-mail address is david.colker@latimes.com.