David Shapshak
Apart from leaving the world with his crazy, eccentric comic genius, Douglas Adams created an online version of his famous eponymous travel-guide novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The online version, h2g2 (www. h2g2.com), is named after the Guide and is every bit as brilliant as any of Adams’s off-the-wall novels. It has the same format as his fictional one: roving researchers (anyone anywhere in the world) filing reports through the SubEthaNet (the Internet in this case) about “life, the universe and everything”. Anyone can log on as a researcher, and all contributions are edited before being displayed.
Adams who was an early adopter of new technologies and avidly interested in science, counting scientist Richard Dawkins as one of his friends has created one of the purest forms of what the Internet once professed to offer: real people writing about real places.
H2g2 is awash with good copy and is one of the most intelligent sources of good articles, travel snippets and the other general flotsam of good literature on the Web.
“He was pretty unique in being innovative in media after media from radio to the Web. He was still coming up with more new ideas than almost anyone I’ve met,” said Ashley Highfield, the BBC director of new media, who worked with Adams on his website. “His brainchild the h2g2 website is groundbreaking in enabling an online encyclopaedia to be created by the people for the people.”
Adams himself wrote: “We’re gradually beginning to get some tiny, tiny inkling of how powerful a networked community sharing information really could become.”
In the Guide series, the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything was, of course, the cryptic 42, which Adams adopted as his user number U42. Christened Douglas Noel Adams, he had a fondness for calling himself DNA. “This led him to joke later that he had been DNA in Cambridge several months before Watson and Crick made their famous discovery,” The Observer noted after the heart attack that killed him last month. He was 49.
The website is filled with Adams’s wacky sense of humour. One of his own postings was: “Future perfect: a term that has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.”
And one of the editors has a link to a webcam of his feet. When he is not online, you can watch previous footage of his socks squirming around. It’s as much an ironic parody of the “put a webcam on it” insanity that prevailed on the Web for a while (you can see live images of Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion if you really want to).
But, biting satire apart, there are a lot of very good articles on everything from the origins of the MP3 file format (a little-known German institute that never made any money out of it) to mythology, architecture or entertainment.
What sets h2g2 apart is the amount of vibrant discussion between members, or researchers, much of it with an appealing intellectualism and humour.
It’s divided, of course, into sections titled Life, The Universe and Everything. The first covers, well, life: arts, literature, current affairs, movies, sex; while The Universe is mostly about travel as well as astronomy, space travel and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Everything covers everything else, from architecture to religion, crime to politics.
Although Adams suffered from notorious writer’s block despite his prolific output his famous quote is loved by all journalists: “I love deadlines I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by” he was something of a visionary.
His introduction to the h2g2 downplays his own predictive insight in customary fashion: as well as making a riotous remark about the Millennium Bug, he was spot on. He wrote: “I really didn’t foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course the computer industry didn’t even foresee that the century was going to end.”
But Adams did see a shift away from desktop computers as the primary source of viewing the Internet.
“At the moment we’re sharing the sort of information we think about or come across as we sit at our desks, because that’s mostly where our computers are at least, that’s mostly where our networked computers are. And we’re sharing it in the form that comes most naturally to people sitting working at desks we’re writing articles about our experiences and ideas and opinions.
“What we are now focused on at h2g2 is what happens when people start to share information while they are on the move. Soon we will start to see devices arriving that combine palmtop computers with cellphones with Internet devices with GPS [global positioning systems]. That in a phrase we hear over and over again when people talk about the Internet will change everything. You’ll be able to read and write to the Guide wherever you are: at the station, in the plane, on a park bench, in your car (pulled over to the side of the road with the handbrake on, of course), in a caf.”