Testing the Waters Before Surfing the Net

Some people take to the information superhighway like teenagers to a roller coaster.

It’s a game for them, which means they have no fear of wasting untold hours on futile trips down dead-end byways. And no regrets.

In the contemporary office, there are more and more of them, and the rest of us can take less and less consolation in the fact that they are sedentary, graceless techno-brats who would rather go to https://www.movielink.com than take a friend to the movies.

One senses that the things they’re constantly finding there and bringing back have already evolved from the juvenile “cool” to the more serious “useful” and are fast becoming the scary “indispensable.”

So the time comes when the timid, the unimaginative and even the recalcitrant must jump, however tremulously, into the Internet.

But how? Where do you begin when you don’t know the difference between Netscape and the World Wide Web?

The traditional way would be school. And, sure enough, there are Internet classes for dummies.

I found one that meets every Wednesday night for two hours in a suite of cubbyholes hidden in one of those faceless, single-story concrete buildings that stretch like rows of dominoes across parts of Chatsworth.

This building, on Lurline Avenue, is the headquarters of WestWorld Communications Inc., one of those fast-multiplying companies that hook people into the Net for a fee.

The classroom, at the back of a long hallway of computer-filled offices, had been thrown together at the close of the workday by spacing a couple of dozen plastic, white patio chairs alongside a bay of desks.

A poster on one wall was worrisome. It showed a spider-web organization chart under the title “Java Class Hierarchy Diagrams.”

I hoped it wasn’t going to be required reading.

The instructor, Ron Pollock, turned off the lights without even the pro forma first-name introductions. So it was going to be anonymous: me, six other men scattered about and a couple in the front row. No need to make connections between one another in the classroom as we learn to connect with whomever we need in cyberspace.

Pollock started with e-mail, for the most part letting the screen do the talking as he demonstrated the software handed out free to each student.

(Later inspection established that it is not truly free. It’s called “shareware,” meaning it can be freely distributed, but those who use it are bound by conscience to mail in a registration fee.)

Pollock, a trim man in his mid-30s, stood in the glow of two computers, one a PC, the other a Macintosh. He demonstrated each procedure on both of them by flicking a switch on a box at his feet that carried the signal to the screen.

He lectured with a technical kind of gusto but little emotion and no humor, his best shtick mock embarrassment when he typed with no effect on the keyboard that wasn’t connected.

About half the students sat through the two hours without uttering a word. The questions of the others revealed that some knew a lot and some knew next to nothing. A middle-aged man in shorts who sat up front peppered Pollock with questions, leaving the impression that he had read much but understood little.

Not long into the lecture, one young man walked out without explanation. But soon a tall, blond woman came in late, eliciting a smile from Pollock that suggested she had been in the class before.

Her questions quickly brightened the room, shifting the emphasis from the dreary and confusing “how” to the scintillating “why.”

Having moved from e-mail to newsgroups, those electronic meeting halls for people of like interests, Pollock clicked his way to one called rec.nude.

The screen filled with a catalog of messages, each tagged with a headline, such as, “Does the Bible say going nude is a sin?” or “Advice sought for taking 11-year-old to Sandy Hook.”

Pausing only briefly, Pollock had switched to another newsgroup index when the blond interjected: “Wait!”

Breathlessly, she added: “I wanted you to go to ‘Nude Beaches Near Malibu.’ ”

Pollock retraced his steps to that title and opened a treatise attached to it.

“Oh,” the blond said with unconcealed disappointment, reading the first line out loud. “There are none per se.”

It was somewhat anticlimactic then when Pollock announced, “It’s time to move on to the fun part.”

He meant browsing the World Wide Web.

“I noticed Yahoo,” the blond interrupted as he introduced WestWorld’s home page. “Can you connect to Yahoo?”

Compliantly, Pollock moved to a screen topped by the word “Yahoo” in large, whimsical letters and typed “fishing” into its search box.

Yahoo spit out hundreds of citations of fishing stuff that Pollock obviously found pretty cool. But seeing no reaction from the crowd to this modest revelation, he returned to the less emotive vocabulary of computers for his next search, getting 479,395 cites for the words “liquid” and “crystal.”

Wrapping up, Pollock looked up his own address in the Internet “white pages,” visited the Los Angeles Times home page and showed a photograph of Mawson Station, Antarctica, taken at 9 a.m. the next morning--across the international date line--courtesy of a guy named Tommy who spends his time searching the Web for real-time photos.

“You’re on your own,” he said at last, sending us off. “It’s a big Internet out there.”

Next morning I checked into work not knowing whether or not I had learned anything.

I put WestWorld’s disk into my computer and followed the instructions on the screen.

It took a couple of calls to the technical line before I had WestWorld’s home page before me. Bypassing “What’s Cool,” I clicked “What’s New” and saw the words “Picks of the Week” in blue. I clicked. In the list that appeared, my eye came to rest on “Free the World of Insane Telephone Solicitation.”

Another click and I was on “Anti-Telemarketer Online,” an Internet site “dedicated to the cause of providing the public with a humorous and informative way of battling unwanted telephone sales calls.”

It offered information on the law, psychological tips and the simple steps to get on a solicitor’s “Do Not Call” list.

It signed off with the 800 number for Ameritech Annoyance Call Bureau.

That was cool!