Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Internet is an anarchistic e-mail network that has spread uncontrollably and now circles the globe. Taking a journey through its highways and byways, this book explores the networks and debates the issues created by this new technology.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

A 22-year-old Internet addict who has written for Esquire and the Miami Herald talks about life on the electronic frontier. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The information Superhighway's bright corporate future may or may not come, but the Net, shows Herz, already has a fully developed and wonderfully idiosyncratic culture. Herz here captures the grungy (if that can be said of the Net's ghostly text-based presence), junk-food and black-coffee, 24-hour-a-day reality of the Net. She describes the endless lines of text messages, the weird Star Wars-like virtual bar-at-the-end-of-the-universe sensibility of IRC real-time chat; the head-splitting fantasy game-like intricacies of Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs); the electronic cross-dressing (no one's ``persona'' can be taken seriously); and the curious-and sometimes poignant-personalities that haunt the Net's more obscure byways. There's hilarious stuff here: The Alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die newsgroup, dedicated to destroying the ``purple pederast''; or Alt.alien.visitors and its loopy discussions of good and bad space aliens; or the ``counter-intuitive'' cyber-serenity of ZenMoo, the meditative site that rewards its users for logging on and doing nothing (``hair will grow on your palms if you keep typing,'' says the Moo program). By using numerous excerpts of screen text, the book is almost too effective at recreating the numbing, all-text look of the pre-World Wide Web Net. Indeed, most remarkable is the extraordinary amount of time (``12, 15, 20 hours a day'') Herz and other hardcore cybernauts spend staring into the sickly glow of computer screens. Despite coming to question her own online habit, Herz, a staff member of Wired magazine, has written a brisk, funny and detailed homage to Net culture and conveys some measure of its addictive fascination. (Apr) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

In the avenues of the Internet, adventurers can find a plethora of fun but enigmatic discussion groups and games, each with its own cloistered customs and codes. It's a world seldom traveled, even by most seasoned network users, so Herz's book really provides vicarious thrills as well as insights into an electronic culture that remains on the margins of cyberspace. While a college student, Herz was initially attracted to "the Net" when she "barged into a cabal secretly plotting to torture, sodomize, maim, and kill Star Trek`s Ensign Wesley Crusher." Thereafter, she joined on-line discussions with cyberpunks and computer hackers and became involved in complex virtual reality, multiuser fantasy games. Although Herz quotes liberally from her E-mail, her book is more than just a hodgepodge of her interchanges. She has important insights about being a woman who lurks on the predominantly male (hormone dysfunctional teenage male, at that) networks. Even nonusers should find Surfing an endearingly brazen travelogue, and everyone should appreciate its useful glossary of the Net's frequently used acronyms. --Aaron Cohen

Kirkus Book Review

What Jack Kerouac was to the dashboard, Herz (of Wired magazine) aspires to be to the keyboard in this dizzying ride on the information low road. This is no how-to book. It's a what's-up book, an intimate survey of the hippest Internet hangouts and a kiss-and-tell about the cyberpunk squatters therein. This is not the Internet of educational research and political debate. We're talking Kurt Cobain conspiracy theories and NetSleaze. Herz's writing style is a reflection of this environment and brings new meaning to the term ``hypertext.'' It's breathless and scattered, an English purist's nightmare, and of just the right timbre to express the underlying, disturbing dynamic of a world populated by seemingly quite lonely ex-teenagers who are beat because they've been up all night typing out their frustrations. Most of the book is given over to these cybernerds in the form of testimonials taken straight from the screen and endless, transcribed chat sessions, including a very graphic encounter between the author, disguised as a gay male, and another netter claiming like orientation. Herz goes on to note, ``You're yammering away with the fantasy personalities of total strangers like they're block captains of the local homeowners association. Your neighbors are people with names like Digital Blade...it all seems completely normal.'' Normal, perhaps, but intriguing only up to a point. A lengthy chapter on a Barney-the- dinosaur hate group, for example, drives the humor into the ground, while shorter takes--on a Frank Zappa shrine and a virtual bar where one need only imagine a pool table for it to exist--fare better in capturing the magical aspects of the Net, to which the author finds herself addicted. The book's Netspeak glossary will aid the uninitiated, but the book's mindset defies easy classification and is directed primarily at those already on intimate terms with their modems.