Chock-full of street slang, flashy images and cool computer interfaces, the new World Wide Web page titled "Spiv" should appeal to the MTV crowd for which it was designed.
Released last month by the Turner Entertainment Company, based in Atlanta, Georgia, the Spiv home page focuses on the pop culture that teenagers like, at least according to the perception of contemporary media.
Touting claims such as "You will never communicate the same way again" and calling itself "The Halley's Comet of Web sites," Spiv possesses the spurious braggadocio often heard escaping the mouths of wise-guy high school kids.
By the same token, Spiv also offers a healthy amount of news and commentary pertaining to the pop culture those same Web-surfing high school kids enjoy.
What is worst about Spiv's childish and anachronistic nature is its overwhelming self-consciousness. The whole thing seems to scream, "This page is wacky and will annoy your parents! Check out how cool it is and buy our products!"
Including sections about indie music, fashion, technology and an open-ended chat forum, Spiv defines what MTV would look like if it happened to be on-line.
Lacking any real substance, Spiv will probably disappoint the typical Dartmouth student. But for those students who would rather vegetate in front of a computer screen than a television set, Spiv would very well do the trick.
Spiv, located at www.spiv.com, opens with a chaotic and large homepage combining a confusing table of contents and an editorial column about something in pop culture -- one day, it had an editorial badmouthing NBC's show "Friends" for being too white.
Yesterday, the editorial urged caution in the wake of President Bill Clinton's signing of the Communications Act of 1996, which some fear could limit the internet's range of expression.
The editorial read, "Like a lot of Americans we let the machinations of government pass us by until it worked its way into our piece of cyberspace."
The most confusing aspect of the table of contents are the titles of the contents themselves: "Antidote," "Nrrrd," "Shiitake" and "Zooey."
Antidote, a section inundated with digitized images of medical x-rays, features reviews and gossip about the newest indie bands.
However, Antidote will probably confuse someone unaccustomed to Spiv, because the first screen of Antidote fails to describe the contents of the section, but instead includes yet another confusing table of contents, including such subsections as Din, Itinerary, Plunder, Ranarium, Rant and Yammer.
As for the actual content, that leaves much to be desired as well. Antidote included descriptions and biographies of two hip new bands, Idiot Flesh and Thirty Ought Six. Spiv included sound samples and anecdotes from the bands, but no substantive reviews of either. Instead, the writers for the page simply heaped subjective praise upon the two bands.
But at least it looks cool.
And so do the other three pages, but they are equally discombobulated and silly.
Nrrrd is all about new technology and what people think about it. Nrrrd is broken down to Humans, Interzone, Just the Hacks, The Lab, Pennies, The Shop, Ways and Means and Weird Science.
Humans included some light fiction, Interzone had some computer art, Just the Hacks featured the litany of a professed computer hacker, The Lab showed off Polaroid cameras, Pennies included an interview with a computer game designer, The Shop featured some new inventions, Ways and Means was a commentary and Weird Science had an article about nanotechnology.
The third page, Shiitake, was the easiest to use. It is a chat forum where Web-surfers can engage in interesting dialogues with other computer users.
The site called "Pool of Knowledge" in Shiitake advertised "Online discussion. Live chat. Philosophize, spread rumors, start conspiracy theories, drink too much coffee."
Having a bad day? "The Last Word" site on this page provides an outlet in which one can rant about just about anything bad that happened. Anything from getting up on the wrong side of the bed this morning to getting chased by a local fraternity dog.
Yesterday, someone with the electronic-mail address duke@claycomb.com wrote about one of his worst days.
The story read, "January 1995. Visiting Scottsdale and parked my '83 Oldsmobile at Camelback Mall at noon and saw 'Pulp Fiction.' By the time I got out of the movie, the car had been stolen and stripped clean including the T-top, front and back seats and the ugly brown carpet. Even the moldings encasing the electric window switches. No big deal!"
Zooey focuses on the world of fashion. Like Nrrrd, Zooey is also divided into too many weird subsections: Cara X Model, Catwalk, Lipstick Traces, Male Box, Playthings, Splurge, Street St., Trip Out and V.
Cara X Model and Catwalk both exhibited several digitized photographs of models. Lipstick Traces, Male Box and Splurge each included different pieces of commentary and fashion rhetoric.
Street St. and V featured two different interviews with fashion designers.
The Playthings page let users play computer paper dolls (no joke) and Trip Out provided information about how to look for those considering some travel in Berlin or Vienna.
The Spiv home page may be an interesting place to stop by while surfing the net, if one is in search of superficial culture. But time could and perhaps should be spent on more intellectual pursuits.
