When you use the Internet, be careful of terms you use. E.J. Dionne, Jr., an American columnist wanting to research evangelical belief in the Rapture, defined by Dionne thus: “The idea, roughly, is that at the moment of Armageddon, when the good and bad people face each other at the end of the world, God creates an opening through which all the good people are delivered from the mess and brought into heaven. The rest are in the soup.” (Of course, this is quite wrong in that Armageddon and “the end of the world” are separated by at least 1,000 years, but that’s not what this article is about.) Dionne went to the Web and wrote in “rapture.” There on the screen, side by side, were a series of religious sites devoted to explaining the sacred rapture and another series of sites devoted to pornography. As Dionne says, “Welcome to cyber-pluralism.”

The Internet makes learning almost anything about anything possible. It increases productivity in many occupations. And it’s not difficult. I’m no cybernik or cyberutopian because, as Dionne says, the Web does not change human nature, and we still live lives face to face.

However, Dionne compares computer use to telephone use, and that undermines part of the argument. After all, people now use the telephone, and office e-mail, sometimes in place of human contact–people who live or work physically near each other often communicate electronically. It’s great for a deaf guy like me, so I’m not complaining.

But Dionne is right to note that the sites for sacred and sexual rapture, existing side by side, exemplify promises and temptations that long predated the information age.

UK: Novelist Charles Cumming is writing The 21 Steps, a web version of John Buchan’s World War I spy novel The 39 Steps, told through Google Maps. People read text, click pointer bubbles marking each scene, and follow the hero’s race from London’s St Pancras train station to Heathrow airport to Edinburgh, so see real-world places in context. Penguin Books collaborates with media company Six to Start to tell stories on web. Instead of reading novels adapted to online use, they want to create stories designed for the Internet.

In 2006, online magazine Slate serialized Walter Kirn’s novel to hyperlink and merge media. Cell-phone novels were Japan’s top three best-sellers last year.

In 2007, Penguin’s Ettinghausen tried a wikinovel—a book-length story written by everyone, with predictably atrocious results. Cumming says, ‘ can’t imagine War and Peace told in the style of a Google mash-up.’ Barrett Sheridan in Newsweek (‘New Ways of Telling Tales’, p10, 2008/5/12), says that to Ettinghausen, ‘that might sound less like a statement of fact and more like a challenge.’ Apparently, neither Cumming nor Sheridan ‘get it’—Ettinghausen doesn’t want to rewrite either 39 Steps or War and Peace, but create something new.