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Internet Down the Road:
What It Means For Everyone

Opportunities To “Do What You Love, And The Money Will Follow....”

by Alexandra Han

“Do What You Love, And The Money Will Follow” is the title of a book currently in bookstores and libraries. The Internet is paving the way for all of us to do exactly that...including this Deaf writer.

Never a technophile, when I first got Internet connection two years ago, I typed in keywords, such as “feminism”, or “cats”, in some search engines, such as Yahoo! or Excite, and ended up with a list of web sites / home pages, some good, some mediocre. I surfed around at random, and said, ‘Interesting, even informative’.

Then I shut down my Internet connection and went about with my real life.

Since then, I’ve found that there is more to the Internet than meet the eye. It’s not just a place where you surf at random and say ‘Well, isn’t that nice,’ and then log off.

The Internet: Disseminating Information Without Middlepersons

Esther Dyson, well-known “cyber-guru” and author of “Release 2.0 : A Design for Living in the Digital Age” says of how the Internet will affect “ordinary” people, including, naturally, women: “....the biggest change is that it will be easy for individuals to become producers, publishers....(to) whip up a batch of cookies and sell them on the Net, post your own poetry, organize a soccer team....or start a movement to put a stop sign at a local intersection. Suddenly, mass production, mass media, mass government will face real competition from the little guys.”

And:

“It changes the balance of power between big and small, near and remote, vendor and consumer, mass media and audience, government and citizens.”

She’s talking about the power to do what you want without having to deal with publishers, art galleries, mass media and even governments sometimes.

Mass media do decide whether our story is “important” enough to tell, and what details to include, and what not. They may ignore issues that aren’t overly dramatic or compelling, but still matter. This often frustrates non-profit organizations. As a freelance writer, I’ve had to work hard to convince an editor that it was a good idea to write about an environmentally friendly substitute which was easy to use and would decrease local pollution. I know what that’s like.

Publishers and art galleries do decide which books and art work to accept, and which not. While the persistent writer and artist will usually win out in the end, the process can be grilling.

But online we can disseminate information, and exhibit our work to a large audience, without any middleperson whatsoever, merely by building our own web site. In other words, we’re putting the power back in our own hands. Which is where it belongs.

And the Internet is global. It never sleeps. Hence, the potential for a very real audience is there.

As Gary Gach, author of “Writers.net” (the book, not the web site, which belongs to someone else), which explores in great detail how writers can exploit the Internet for their own purposes, says, “Today, a writer can publish a daily essay about anything and, if it’s any good, attract a following of about ten thousand readers.” And it can be a lot more than that.

Building Your Own Web Site: But Just How Hard Is It, Really?

You’d think that you’d have to practically be a computer expert to build your own professionally attractive web site. Amazingly, though, free software now exist which allows you to construct web sites with just basic Internet skills.

In other words, you don’t have to know a lot about HyperText MarkUp Language (HTML), a computer language which is necessary for making web sites / home pages. Although it helps to have an understanding of how HTML works.

Good, basic HTML really isn’t that hard to learn.

Suppose I write:

I’d save it and then upload it (a simple skill) so that it would blink for you online.

You may want to read Denise Osted’s how-to feature, “A Web Page Of Your Own”, in the Summer 1997 issue of Women’space, for more information.

So You Wanna Have People Find Your Web Site, Huh?

What’s more: we can even set our web site up so that it’s easier to find.

Apparently search engines or tools will find practically anything if you’re a real computer expert - which I am not. However, there’s a simple way to allow your web site to show up better when Internet users performs a search for specific terms. Just find the right ‘meta tag’ in your HTML for keywords, and type in specific words for the search engines to find, so other people can see you more easily.

This is what it looks like in HTML (just in case you want to know):

You can also do this, not just for the web home page itself, but also for all the other sub-pages in your web site. You can type in different keywords for each different web page, and the search engine will be more likely to pick up on it.

As well, you can register your web site (for free; don’t you know, tons of things are free online?) with individual search engines, so that when people use these search engines, the search engines will come up with your home site automatically. Just go to a search engine such as Excite or infoseek and look for “add URL” or “register here”. Follow the instructions. And there ya go!

You just have to have the patience, the willingness and, of course, time, to learn, and you can construct free web sites to disseminate information.

Trust me on this one. I just finished building a web site for an organization. When I started this contract job, I didn’t have any real web page skills (I DID, however, have enough Internet skills, which helped). It took me a few weeks to learn what I had to learn, I’ll admit, and there were those times when I could cheerfully strangle the computer because I couldn’t get anywhere or get the desired results, and ended up tapping the same keys over and over pointlessly. (I still do that at times....) However, most of the skills involved were not that hard, although I did need some tutoring from a friend. The best way to learn, I found, was merely by playing with the software and the programs, letting myself make mistakes, seeing what happens. If one’s in no great big hurry to complete a web site, it can be quite enjoyable.

And one day soon I’ll be building my own web site, for my own purposes.