A magazine with a Web site that doubles its hard-copy is not a genuine Webzine. To be genuine relates to the essence of nobility and, as such, can be proved only by taking risks. The nobleman holds to his domain defends it with his arms and adorns his namewith glory. The Webzine goes decidedly cyber, holds exclusively to its Web site and covers its domain-name with prestige. The Webzines started, unsurprisingly, on the West Coast - a traditional place for taking risks - and soon became the fun and the excitement of the Web, contributing to the development of a specific stylistic and of durable solidarity.

At first, a multimedial focus was prevalent. Site design, whimsical interactions and playful effects overcame other stylistic considerations. However, the baroque intricate combinations of images and sounds soon looked dated. Now, the most flamboyant sites are not the Webzines any more, but the homepages, which combine the vanity of self-exposure to a desperate commitment to marketing. The present high-quality Webzines focus on content, not on look, while their sponsors focus on customers. The latter are supposed to plunge incautiously into content, exposing customers to commercials and tempting them to make online purchases.

To be seductive, one has to develop one's charm. Consequently, the focus on careful literary composition has considerably improved. As James Poniewozik remarked in Salon Magazine the most unexpected thing to happen to Webzines was that people started to read them, not just to go through them. This increased the commitment to literary quality and narrowed the gap between Web-posted and printed texts. However, in spite of the fact that some Web-posted papers have been subsequently published, presumably in an attempt at legitimization, the good cyber-discourse differs considerably from the well-tailored, real-life one.

Few of the authors of the elaborate cyber-discourses really believe that brevity is the soul of wit. Polonius advocated this rule, without observing it (according to Hamlet, act II, scene 1); cyber-authors, spoiled by disk-space availability, can afford to disregard it (Salon Magazine). The modular conception, which governs the cyber-discourse, is responsible for its organization in self-contained fragments, duly interlinked. The ordering of these fragments into a pattern mirrors - unconsciously, no doubt - the main structures of primitive software: the sequence, the bifurcation and the iteration.

Within a fragment, as well as in the sequence structure, the dominant rhetorical figure is the list. The enumeration of similar entities within a statement is supposed to cast a spell on the audience, intoxicated with the vapors of synonymity. Moreover, the statements in a sequence - arguments, examples, exhortations - are also organized in a list, instead of in a logical tree and this, together with the minimal syntactical variation, has the effect of paralyzing the resistance through criticism. Here is an example:

But I haven't taken the big risks…I experimented with "something else" in small ways: giving no exams, sitting out in the classroom rather than in front of the room, holding classes in bars, restaurants, homes, parks and beaches, allowing students to grade themselves, giving no lectures, having no textbooks, abolishing attendance, wearing T-shirts and boots, cooking food in the classroom, having pizza delivered, serving tea and bagels, deliberately not showing up for class, arranging for various deceptions such as pretending to be somebody else, being paged during class and having beautiful women come in and kiss me. I even staged a standing ovation for myself during an evaluation, wowing the college president in the bargain. (David Alford Experimental Lesson salon.com, November 19, 1999).

The list is even more attractive when the author takes advantage of the permissiveness of the screen as far as outspoken language is concerned:

There exist euphemisms that, while limning the lewd, offer themselves up on a different plane: that of verbal delectation. Compared with dick, schlong, johnson, willy and so many more, shvantz offers something almost serene and glowing, perhaps recalling Weinberger's Schwanda the Bagpiper or the elegant skater's curve cut on the water by Sibelius's swan. (Paul West, De Vulgari Eloquentia: A Gutter's Glossary nerve.com, archives).

Interspersing rare, precious terms within a smutty list and concluding it with a refined image (as in the above quotation) or a sophisticated cultural reference (as in the below example) is so frequent in cyber-discourses, that it almost touches the cliché:

Thus, I'm a practicing heterosexual (well, most of the time), who nonetheless likes gay and bisexual…as well as bestiality, necrophilia, transgender imagery, inter-generational sex, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, fetishism, etc…as far as literature and the life of the endocrines goes, permanent revolution -- as Trotsky described it -- seems to be the best approach. (Rick Moody, Polysexuality nerve.com, archives.)

Apparently, the bifurcation offers the reader a greater freedom of choice concerning the text he activates out of the virtual hypertext. Actually, people have always skipped words, paragraphs, even pages, while reading. Moreover, nothing could prevent them from going straight to the end (for instance, to learn who the murderer is or to see if a happy ending is provided) and resume the lecture from where it pleased them. Now, they are so-to-say compelled to take liberties only when the author thinks it is appropriate and along the directions he deems acceptable.

The iteration of arguments, similar to the DO-cycle structure, takes the conclusion of a statement and works upon it in the same way that proved successful before. The tediousness is avoided by the directness of tone and the personalized account which try to capture the reader:

If he's lucky, the once proud ship-worker is now peddling his buff body to porn movie agents, praying he'll maintain his hard-on through the sex scenes all the way to the money shot, so called because, Faludi reports, remuneration is entirely contingent on successful ejaculation. No come, no pay.(Emily Eakin on Susan Faludi's Stiffed in salon.com, archives).

The same glittering, iterated discourse is to be found in Camille Paglia's column from salon.com:

Well, first of all, I think Naomi Wolf's parents should sue her alma mater, Yale University, for malpractice. If we judge by her clarity of reasoning and command of language at age 37, her education was a fraud. She was injected with passé feminist and post-structuralist doctrine at an impressionable age, and she never received the kind of …training…that she desperately needed. (November 17, 1999.)

It is amusing to note that this kind of easy, self-repetitive, allusive, elegant and witty prose had been popular in French magazines, like Le Nouvel Observateur, even before the advent of the Web:

The Berlin wall, I mean its fall, is something nobody anticipated, predicted, or even imagined. But everybody rushed to celebrate it, even France, who had been the least concerned. Special guests: Gorbatchev…George Bush…and Helmut Kohl…One would have thought to see some zombies. Rostropovich played Bach for them, presumably to thank God. (Françoise Giroud, Le Nouvel Observateur, November 18, 1999.)

Suspicious at such overtones of naughty witticism, the Anglo-Saxon intellectual has always prided herself to be less frivolous and more consistent than the Latin one. Consider, for instance, the knowledge-dispenser standpoint of the author in the following excerpt:

Art is the objectifying of the will in a thing or performance, and the provoking or arousing of the will. From the point of view of the artist, it is the objectifying of a volition; from the point of view of the spectator, it is the condition of an imaginary décor for the will. (Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1969, p. 31).

Now, a simple comparison shows Camille Paglia, the Queen of anti-political correctness, closer to Françoise Giroud than to Susan Sontag. The cyber-discourse melted down the traditional opposition between commonsensical Anglo-Saxon wisdom and flippant French esprit. Once gone cyber, like stars in Heaven, one is bound to shine. Or to spark.

Copyright © 2000 Adrian Mihalache All Rights Reserved

Adrian N. Mihalache is a professor at the "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Romania. Presently, he is a Fulbright Scholar at Western Michigan University, Department of Anthropology where, together with Professor Arthur Helweg, he is working on the book "Ethnology of Cyberspace".