by Simon Jenkins

It's like veteran astronaut John Glenn returning to earth and stepping from his spacecraft only to be buttonholed by an excited journalist with the news: "Hey John! Did you know the earth is round?"

The Church's Board for Social Responsibility, which has produced the splendidly titled "Cybernauts Awake!" is no doubt planning further reports on how Christians can make the best use of acoustic guitars and golfball typewriters in reaching today's young teens.

The Board for Social Responsibility commissioned the report back in 1996. A speedy three years later and they have delivered a document which reveals that several members of the working party who wrote it were not familiar with email. "Nearly all the authors of this report exchanged files by email," they burble innocently. "Any who were not on email had difficulty keeping up with the rapidly unfolding drama of debate, edits and decisions."

Um... yes. And maybe this is why their work sometimes sounds like a fairytale, at other times like an idiot's guide, and only intermittently like the serious contribution to debate about the Internet that it claims to be.

"Every now and again something happens to us that lets us dream new dreams."

Or like this...

"Computers... they are truly dream machines."

Or even like this...

"In the story of the blind men and elephant, each person got hold of a different part of the elephant..."

ProfessorBot is a more serious contributor and has written some moderately interesting stuff on most of the major areas of debate about the Net. But he or she, like the other robots, exists in a vacuum and doesn't engage in any depth with the key players who are currently writing about the Net. Some major texts on virtual community, Net psychology and online business are missing from the patchy bibliography.

A third source we have identified is BleedingObviousBot. This source has some of the best lines in the whole report, and his wit and wisdom is worth quoting at length. A warning: you are about to be exposed to ideas which will seem new and alarming and may cause loss of sleep:

"Computer games can be addictive."

"The Internet has much junk as well as much joy."

"Wealth is not something to be sought for its own sake."

"One of the most daunting things about computers is that they are so terribly good and so terribly bad at the same time."

"You cannot find real food to eat or water to drink in cyberspace."

"When cyberspace spans the world, it also spans the time zones."

"Computers are willy-nilly changing the society we live in, for good or ill, or perhaps for both."

This robot also offers helpful advice about putting a smiley after jokes, not shouting by using CAPITAL LETTERS and avoiding flaming. This advice is obviously helpful because all the report's robots must have agreed that Christians are so hopelessly behind the times that they have never considered these absolute basics of email.

A final source is VirginBot, who enjoys discussing areas in which she has no direct experience, but which she has read about in books or newspapers, or heard second-hand from a friend. VirginBot is probably "not on email" (see above), but she has a friend who has taken that brave technological leap. And even more, she knows a genuine cybernaut and brings news of distant, exotic events such as...

"Two people known to one of the authors got to know each other entirely by email."

VirginBot is probably the writer of the lamentable section, "Relationships in Cyberspace", where online community – arguably the most fascinating and characteristic aspect of the Net – is discussed by someone who clearly does not know the territory. It's Sylvester Stallone meets nuclear physics.

The report has landed out of a clear blue sky for COIN (Christians on the Internet), Anglicans Online, the Diocese of Ely and other pioneers who were out there on the Net long before this report was commissioned. Maybe this has happened because five out of the nine people on the report committee are professors. It would be interesting to know the average age of the working group, why so many of them are academics, and why it includes only two women.

Speaking about astronomers looking at distant galaxies, the report notes that "they are observing events which happened at least a million years ago." Somehow these words seem particularly appropriate when reading this report.

Cybernauts Awake! (Church House Publishing, 1999) is available as a book (£5.95), but the full text is also available on a purpose-built website. The site, with its clunky design and frames-within-frames problems, is not a model for working on the Net, but has the virtue of offering the text free of charge.

© Ship of Fools 1999