This "The Internet" thing is nice, but we often think: What it really needs is a self-proclaimed arbiter of its cultural relevance to undertake the preposterously impossible ambitious task of explaining the entire internet. In a book. Hello, Virginia Heffernan!

One of the internet's most important legacies is its absolute destruction of credentialism. So who better to explain it to the world than New York Times TV-watcher-and-internet-looker-and-writer-about Virginia Heffernan, the one person that every American too old to figure out how to get onto the internet turns to to tell them about said internet, in a magazine column? And tell us, Leon Neyfakh, could the book have a name and theme commensurate to the preposterousness of its ambition?

In the proposal [for the book, tentatively titled The Pleasures of the Internet: How to Live in the New Online Civilization], a copy of which was obtained by the Transom, Ms. Heffernan's book is described as "a complete aesthetics of the Internet" that will treat the Web as a complex work of representational art, complete with "a poetics, a scale, a palette, a rhythm, a sensibility, a set of rituals and spectacles, a system of metaphors and an emotional range."

Haha yes. Very good. A good book to give to, say, your grandmother who retired as a college literature professor a long, long time ago. Explaining the entire internet in a book: Actually a very internetty type of thing to do!
[NYO]

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