Keep cybermerica beautiful.

Are netizens ready to help clean up the Internet's pollution problem?

EACH MORNING, LIKE THOUSANDS OF MY FELLOW U.S. information workers, I begin my day with a little ritual known as "checking the e-mail." Of those hundreds of messages in a week--thousands every couple of months--perhaps a handful will include useful information or correspondence. The rest? So much electronic waste cyber-piling up somewhere on Claretian Publications' mail server.

Among my messages? Crazed and/or furious responses to this column (they used to come in angry, red-crayon scrawls on pieces of brown grocery bags, so the erant actually represents a step in the right direction); quick-rich come-ons; Nigerian bank account schemes; solicitations from pornographers, gambling sites, retail outlets; press releases; calls to action and pleas for various political and social justice groups; bad jokes; and a seemingly endless stream of Internet virus warnings. But perhaps my favorite of all are those gruesome, hilarious, bizarre, or otherwise Ripleyan stories that find their way around the planet in a cyberflash as they jump from mail list to mail list.

Some of them come around in regular cycles--modern urban legends circulated not around a summer campfire but the violet glow of a computer monitor. They swamp my mailbox in a furious wave, warning about asbestos in tampons or legislative threats to public radio, then disappear as abruptly as they arrived, only to revive width renewed fury weeks later when some hapless office drone returns from vacation, checks his mail, and reignites the electronic hysterics all over again.

Many of these stories have made their way around the Net for years: the hapless diver water-dumped by helicopter into a raging forest fire; the proofreader dead at his desk a week before anyone notices; the sad suicide/homicide of Roland Opus (who jumps from the roof of his high-rise apartment but is actually killed by a shotgun blast fired by his father as he flies past the family's living room window).

In 1993, when the first rudimentary browsers were introduced, there were 90,000 users of what would eventually be called the World Wide Web. In 1994, the "Good Times" warning introduced the information age to the virus hoax. By 1999 there were 170 million of us online. Now there are as many as 380 million people surfing the Internet.

Today there are almost 30 million Web sites around the world (if that phrase still retains any meaning in cyber-context) and almost 3 billion Web pages. There's enough information out there to fill a 250-megabyte Zip disk each year for every person on the face of the earth. We are awash in information, smothering in data and technology. And what do we do with it? Tap out high-tech pranks.

In the 1950s and 1960s, America discovered that the benefits of wealth and innovation generated by its formidable industrial output were not completely without cost. Author Rachel Carson introduced us to the silent spring and before too long most of us were aware of the long-term threat of air, soil, and water pollution. Now glowing before us each morning on our computer monitors is the unpleasant industrial by-product of our age: information pollution, cybersludge clogging our global information flows and our minds with useless, pointless, even malicious data at a cost to the information industry that can be measured as surely as the grounding of an oil-tanker or water contamination from a chemical plant.

It has been understood in recent years that we are called to be good stewards of the earth and by extension the technologies we put upon her. The new information economy similarly calls for good stewardship of our Internet pipelines and our minds, a custody of the eyes and the keyboard.

Please understand me. I love the Web. As a graduate student and a journalist, I am now incapable of imagining an academic or professional life without it. I even love a lot of the garbage on the Web, so-called time-suck sites, just as I have to admit to some guilty boob-tube pleasures. But the last thing our gadget-plagued, data-swamped epoch needs is another vast wasteland to lose ourselves and our priorities in. Here's hoping we tap into this technology appropriately and not tap out any offensive slime or recirculate it to our Web-afflicted friends and loved ones.

Please forward this article to everyone on your mail list.

By KEVIN CLARKE, managing editor of online products at Claretian Publications in Chicago.