T'internet at Twelve

Kitti says Trololol

 I have a feeling that this might be the most boring blog post I have ever written - and now I've just sold it to you so beautifully. I know, I know, I'm a genius. Anyway.

I have been online since mid-2002 when my grandad brought me my first computer. It was kept downstairs in the dining room and I was allowed to be on the internet for an hour an evening. To begin with, I spent most of my time on roleplay forums, but then my friends signed up for MSN Messenger and all-too-quickly my evenings were consumed (for an hour, anyway) by talking to people I had already spent six hours that day with. I have absolutely no idea what it was we said to each other, but we thought we were cool (we were twelve at the time).

The first thing I learned about the internet, aged twelve, was that we are alone here. Whilst the internet undoubtedly facilitates communication with people on the other side of the world, it is also a tool for isolation. I don't recall ever surfing the net with a friend sat beside me, and even when my friends and I were talking via instant messenger about homework or who upset who at school or something equally shallow and pointless, I would minimize the chat screens when my parents walked passed and might see. If this is how secretive those of us who are twiddling our virtual thumbs are, I cannot imagine how awful those who are doing things that are genuinely dodgy must be.

I also learned that if I got myself into trouble online, nobody was going to come to help me. That was a little more vague a lesson than the first. A friend sent me an email and, somewhere along the way, the email picked up a worm virus. I believed this friend had sent the virus on purpose, and when confronted, that friend cockily announced that he had (which I sincerely doubt). My parents were furious and called the Police, and an officer came around to our house to speak to me about Internet safety. Even aged twelve and new to computers and the Internet, I realise how out of his depth this officer felt, and everything he told me was stuff I had known since day one. Don't give out your name. Don't tell people where you live. Don't give people too many personal details about yourself. You have no idea who the person on the other side of the computer is (unless he happens to have the same Science homework as you, and saw that kid get hit in the eye with that snowball last week). Etc etc etc. The Police Officer had to agree that I was obviously clued up and he left having done exactly nothing to fix the problem at hand - the fact that someone might have fucked up our computer from the inside on purpose. 

The final maxim/rule I learned, if 'rule' is the right word, is that things said online could not be repeated offline. This came a little later, when I was around fourteen/fifteen. My school friends and I were still chatting on MSN Messenger, and one day I received a friend request from someone in my tutor group whom I didn't know particularly well. We started talking and became pretty good friends, although we only saw each other at school during registration as we didn't have any classes together. One evening, we decided to go on webcam and were just chatting and waving at each other when I realised this guy was flirting with me. We were talking about the non-uniform day we had tomorrow and what we thought the weather would be like and etc etc etc. He said I should wear this jacket I had on because it looked really good. Flattered, I walked into registration the next day wearing the same jacket and flashed him a big smile.

He didn't even catch my eye. He actively avoided me all day.

You knew that was coming, didn't you? Well, aged fourteen, I didn't, and I spent the whole day feeling so annoyed that this friendship I had with this guy online did not translate offline. By the time I logged into MSN Messenger that night, I was thoroughly pissed off. Of course, he wanted to talk to me then and put webcams back on, but I didn't want to know anymore. The separation between the Internet and 'the real world' did not - still does not to this day - exist for me in that way.

These might seem like such trivial anecdotes (and they are), but in the past eight years, things haven't changed that much. Admittedly, nobody logs onto MSN Messenger anymore and we now plaster the Internet with our real names and personal details a la Facebook, but you still cannot assume that something said online holds water offline, nor can we seem to stop being so secretive and alone.

And where online exists the culmination of these tendencies and behaviours? Where are they played out to extremes? You guessed it.

Where did you learn your Internet lessons? And for those of you who existed online in the days before Facebook, how many pseudonyms do you have? Maybe we've met before and known each other by other names ;)

Don't Nuke Our Cyberspace, Bro!

collective hallucination

I have begun reading a book, Technobiophilia, Nature and Cyberspace by Sue Thomas, and although I haven't read very much yet, it is really interesting. Interesting enough to send me scurrying back here to take screenshots of Kitti in space-soldier gear in the multi-coloured sensation that is the bar at Hangars Liquides.

Thomas cites John Perry Barlow's 2006 book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, as discussing how 'the notion of the disembodiment of cyberspace got mixed up with mysticism and LSD for a while',  and goes on to say that the term 'cyberspace' itself has long been out of fashion, except with the military, 'where it represents a potential combat area'. In 2011, the US Department of Defense issued a document entitled a Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, the purpose of which, as I understand it, was to encourage a full use of cyberspace for offensive and defensive purposes. In the foreword (these documents have forewords?!), Barack Obama wrote 'the digital world is no longer a lawless frontier' - but does not go on to say what the virtual world now is.

Thomas goes on to say that the internet, the World Wide Web, cyberspace, the whole lot, has deep roots in nature: 'the bramble of interwined ideas, links, documents, and images create an otherness as thick as a jungle'.

And that's it - that's what I'm getting at, getting into. In a few short pages of this book, a wonderfully terrible and frightening and empowering image of cyberspace, of the virtual world, as being something strange and dangerous and other has materialised. And it is complicated by Thomas' definition of cyberspace as being something that exists only in the mind - so this strange dangerous otherness becomes something we carry around in our heads.

Are you still with me? Maybe this is a bit self-indulgent, but hang in there.

There's a series of episodes of South Park in which the boys have to try to convince the military not to nuke the world's imagination after the imagination has been taken hostage by terrorists. The imagination becomes a battleground, and, in true South Park style the military do, of course, nuke it, and Santa has to save the day. I'm not sure that Santa is going to come and save us if our cyberspace gets nuked.

And doesn't it seem all-too-organic that cyberspace would be associated with LSD and hippydom, since it is a potential space of threat to the US Government? The opposition is almost funny.

What it seems to boil down to is vagueness. We don't yet know, truly, the limits of cyberspace. There are so many dark and shady places online, and in them lurk things most of us couldn't even dream up on an LSD trip. But the worst thing is that it, as a space, is organised. There are groups and hierarchies and networks along which pass all kinds of information in all kinds of formats. Very recently, people have met in cyberspace to organise, and then to conduct, riots and revolutions on grand scales. Is it any wonder that cyberspace and indeed the internet can be viewed as a threat?

Amongst the general public, understanding of how it all works can get mixed up and confused very easily, and misapprehension and not understanding something at all are wonderfully fertile grounds for fear.

Where do we, as inhabitants of the virtual world of Second Life - a 'collective hallucination' that has begun to have more tangible, more visible, roots, if anything in cyberspace does - fit into all of this? How much power do we have to shape cyberspace, considering that the space exists inside everyone who is aware of its existence to whatever degree and it is unlikely that we know nearly enough of these people to begin to make a dent? Whilst we might all be connected in cyberspace, we are most definitely not all listening to each other. Second Life is bigger than any one of us, and it is only a small part of cyberspace in the first place.

Already, it's starting to sound messy. I'm going to stop.

But isn't it interesting?