Wired Style edited by Constance Hale HardWired 170pp, £12 in UK
It's easy enough to become mesmerised by the maps of previous epochs, with their "Here be dragons" tricks for filling in the gaps. Take John Speed's effort from 1626, from its decorative sea monsters in its unchartered oceans to that huge island - yes, island - called California. It took decades of doomed expeditions into the desert before, with great reluctance, the explorers and cartographers reluctantly abandoned that island notion. Since then, though, California has become a sort of island again - not in a physical sense, but in a cultural and linguistic one.
From Silicon Valley to Hollywood, it speaks of frontiers and dreams and pioneers. California represents an optimistic, sunny, shiny future. And Wired is its trendy, trend-filled, supercool house-mag, its road map for the digital age. Yet as the magazine's editor, Kevin Kelly, told the New York Times last month: "You can only be cool once, so I think we're going into a postcool period and we're going to be as radical as we can without being cool . . . [but] we'll still be there trying to scout ahead and report back from this other continent west of California that we call the future." Right. Whether cool or "postcool", Wired is about the cliquish futurespeak of geeks and knowbots, pixels and palmtops, vapourware and wankware, morphs and meatspace. Meat space? Hey, y'know, the place you're in when you're smudging through this newsprint - as opposed to cyberspace, where your digicash resides. Now, after Wired (the mag) and Hotwired (the Web site), comes Wired Style (the book). Subtitled "Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age", it's based on the publishers' stylebook - the internal rules and guidelines for its writers and sub-editors. The book has an arresting ringbinder design, giving it an air of daily practicality, of sitting in a newsroom just dying to be consulted. It lists what kind of conventions to use when writing about very unconventional media such as the Web, email and Usenet "newsgroups".
With their hyperlinks and threads and tit-for-tat chatter, all three media seem to stampede the written word into new extremes. The book takes a mainly populist "go with the flow" stance, and gives illustrations from its own writers' prose and their hit-and-run techniques. These sections are a fine reminder of how vibrant and adventurous North American journalism continues to be.
The heart of the book, though, is half a dozen mini-dictionaries. These are tightly written and ultra-savvy, addressing practical questions such as "What's the plural of a (PC) mouse?" Answer: "mouses".
And how do you print long email addresses? The spelling, by the way, is not "E-mail" or "email" but "email" - reflecting today's keyboard culture (lower case and, if in doubt, smashthe wordstogether and save a keystroke).
So Wired Style swims with the lexical tide. When stuck to choose between what's in Websters and what's on the Web, they'll tend to go with the latter.
No doubt this idealised glorification of the Net will have traditional lexicographers reaching for their CTRL+ALT+DEL keys, and traditionalists will argue that cyberspace already has more than enough space cadets. Why should their rambling, vacuous nonsense dictate things for everyone else?
Wired Style makes such objections sound stuffy - and comes out sounding ever so sensible. "We celebrate subjectivity," it insists, "Write about companies the way people talk about them."
All reasonable advice, but it totters between the two poles of "niche media" and "shared knowledge". On the one hand, it says: "In the era of the World Wide Web, writing from a US-centric perspective is hopelessly outdated." On the other: "Speak the culture. Be elite."
The major fault-line running through this book is its sense of place, or rather, its depressing insularity. Wired Style is so thoroughly US-centric - so much so that it doesn't even realise it. A typical example (with a bit of sexism to boot): "No one needs the taxman spelled out on first reference," it advises, "IRS works fine. Other agencies, like those of the communications industry, don't need spelling out either, whether the FCC, the NSA, NIST, or . . ."
Wired champions a global communications system. Yet, from its sunny island of California, it ignores the real globe, one where most of the population have never made a phone-call, have never used computer mouses, have never even heard of the IRS or NIST.
The experience of its failed UK edition should have been a humbling one. Everything was lost in the transatlantic translation. Wired the magazine/style/world vision couldn't "think European" (let alone think global). Like other explorers who have gone before, it came with a world-view that doesn't work.
As the machines would say, it "doesn't compute". The map is wrong.
Michael Cunningham is an Irish Times staff journalist