Bridge to the Net is a launching pad for access to versatile Internet tools, to help researchers, writers, and shrewd consumers, as well as website designers, promoters and entrepreneurs most effectively navigate through the kaleidoscopic confusion of online information which bombards us everyday. Yes, relevant and intellectually enriching material really IS available, if only we know how and where to look. Meta-systems of navigation which further this quest, like this site, will be as important for the future of the Internet as the incessant parade of new technological toots and whistles.
The confusing smorgasbord of ever-changing material on the Net gives truth to the cliche of "information overload" in an "age of anxiety." Imagine a dumptruck came to your home and dropped hundreds of pounds of paper print-outs on your front lawn every day for the next decade. That huge pile would not begin to scratch the surface of the content available right now, at this moment, in cyberspace. Besides, such a linear and absolutist approach is not the point of this constantly metamorphosing net of gems (and useless rubbish!), this fastest growing communications medium in all history, this electronic reductio ad absurdum of perspectivism (virtually every voice worth hearing now has a virtual soapbox, every crackpot now has a voice, and sites such as Grammatron, where there is no one way to read the text, radically redefine the notion of linear narrative.)
A curious mind seeking new frontiers of knowledge and insight will find the Internet is more than an electronic shopping bazaar, more than a new source of diversionary entertainment in "the society of the spectacle," and the Net will be revealed as even more than the Web (as Gary Gach has amply demonstrated). Sturgeon's Law states that "Ninety percent of everything is crap." (In common parlance this is the quotation, although the science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon really said "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud.") Either statement certainly applies to the Internet, but why waste time on the crud, crap, or rubbish, when pure manna can be found in abundance? Happy hunting.