NERD WITHIN

By JULIAN DIBBELL

If it's true, as they say, that a year on the Internet equals seven in the real world, then Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace (Simon & Schuster; 288 pages; $25) by John Seabrook might have been an epic. Thank goodness it isn't. A travelogue for the literate geek in all of us, Deeper is packed with useful nuggets of info and insight, but its real virtue lies in what it puts aside: the sweeping Olympian perspective adopted by most "wired" writers.

Instead, Seabrook (a New Yorker writer and scion of the Seabrook frozen-food family) keeps his feet firmly planted in a very personal and often very funny account of his own assimilation into the culture of the Net. Sure, his head may spin a bit as he makes his initial encounters--his first E-mail exchange finds him in surprisingly casual conversation with Bill Gates; he samples the mysteries of cybersex disguised as a half-woman, half-faun named Bambi. But a little head spinning is to be expected at first, and Seabrook is never more on target than when coolly observing it in himself.

It's the gradual, wistful loss of his Utopian enthusiasms, though, that shapes Seabrook's narrative. Inspired by the promise of a "virtual community" to join the Well, a legendary West Coast bulletin-board system, Seabrook learns in various hard ways that a community of digital beings can be just as constraining--and cruel--as the corporeal kind. Unwritten rules abound, and when Seabrook breaches a few, the Well's otherwise benevolent group mind turns on him in what one Well veteran calls a Chicken Peck--"where one of the flock shows a bit of blood, and a few of the other chickens (it doesn't take many) use it as a target to peck the bleeder to death."

Still, Seabrook manages to find a place for himself there, and on the Net at large. And if his picaresque journey makes for a meandering tale, he tells it well, and thoughtfully. After two Internet decades of portentous Net hype, it's time somebody did.

--By Julian Dibbell