Lost in Cyberspace

I am jacked into the mainframe baby! I can be anyone I want to be. Connected at 57,600 bytes per second, cavorting among the other millions of internet uses, I can have the athletic ability of Dennis Rodman, the refinement of Tom Cruise and the brain of Bill Gates. In reality, I have the refinement of Dennis Rodman, the athletic ability of Bill Gates and I am nothing like Tom Cruise in any way. Nevertheless, this is why anyone “connected” loves the online experience. We can be the people that we aren’t in a world we don’t know. Though the online experience initially promises a world of excitement and potential, like most other super-technologies, it just isolates us more from the real relationships in our lives and leaves us bereft in our fabricated ones.

The latter part of our millenium will surely be known for the advancement of communication to the point that people gave up on communicating all together. For those who have been living under the chassis of a Smith-Corona for the past few years, the “online experience” I am referring to is being connected to the internet. Services like America Online (AOL), The Microsoft Network (MSN) and ICQ (“I Seek You,”.. get it?) provide the software and access to travel into a wired, spidered world of enchantment. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, we find ourselves engulfed in a mysterious, fantastical world of potential, yet we are alone, connected to no one, separated from friends & family, replacing flesh and life with pixel images and crude sound.

Atlanta is now in the middle of this Wonderland of digital detachment. With the merger of Mindspring and Earthlink, to be based here, Atlanta will now be home to the 2nd largest internet service provider in the world, (behind AOL) serving over 4 million modem-happy customers.

I have been online through AOL for about 6 years and I am quite Oprah-worthy in the things I have seen and surfed. But I really haven’t seen anything have I?...There are no smells, there is no tasting. You can’t touch and you can’t be touched. Franky, the internet lags way behind television in sensory experience and behind books and magazines in literary content. So what’s the attraction? It’s the isolation from reality. We can now “get away” without ever leaving our hutch. I am Howard Hughes swallowed up by the Spruce Goose. The internet is our island and we choose to be Robinson Crusoe.

In a recent survey, 80% of workers stated that they would rather communicate with other employees by email than by phone or personal contact. Now, THAT is the definition of workplace isolation. I wonder if Y2K will bring computer kiosks to the water cooler, so workers can just remain in their cubicles and email-in their gossip and chatter.

This technology that has supposedly been created to make our world smaller and smaller, to bring all people closer together, has really only given us more distraction from our own real world of family, friends and co-workers. I saw a special on these new “internet cafes” that are the rage in Europe and moving here quickly. The video tape shot inside the cafe was symbolic of the whole internet experience: Here was a diner filled with people, all sitting at computer terminals built into the walls that ran throughout, but they all had their backs towards each other. And this is what every online user has to face today, every time we spend a minute or an hour at our keyboard, just who have we turned our back on?

Billy Murphy -- 10/23/99