Computers/Internet: YourLife - Beyond "Cyberspace"

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by Michelle Chihara, Former Computers/Internet Editor
July 1, 1997

A vision of something called "cyberspace" exists out there, in the "unplugged" world, of a land of darkened chat rooms, populated with hungry pedophiles and lonely teenagers. Even people who occasionally spend time on the Web imagine a depth of space underneath their usual mainstream, acronym-populated stops — a vast digital sea of isolated souls lurking somewhere many clicks below CNET and CNN. Behind every sensationalist headline where the Internet becomes the villain (often in crimes committed far away from computers, but where perpetrators have met, or spoken, or spent time online) lies the specter of this supposedly isolating, anti-social space. Received wisdom has imagined a virtual world where people type silently into the warm glow of their monitors — living, in some mysterious, nefarious way, on the Internet.

There is no such thing as "cyberspace." Yes, media are powerful — TV changed our world forever. But we're used to it now, so it's still deemed more normal to be a "couch-potato" than a "Web-freak." After having had The Tube around for a few decades, we know that no matter how much time you spend watching Must See NBC, you don't usually mistake your reality for that of the characters on Friends. I would actually argue that TV is a much more mind-morphing, time-sucking, anti-social phenomenon than the Internet. But nobody worries about getting sucked into TV land. Eventually, we won't be afraid of "cyberspace," either.

For now, those of us working in this crazy little thing called New Media are in the exciting and exhilarating formative era, where we get to prophesize a lot. Much has been written about all of these terms, from "cyberspace" to "Virtual Reality," exploring what they really mean and how they have affected us. Most of us, even those of us who should probably know better, still use them. They are metaphors that have helped us get our minds around what we're looking at on our monitors. They've helped us shape our perception of the larger reality behind the files that take five minutes to download onto our computer screens. I don't pretend to have surveyed all of the linguistic research that has examined this new terminology, but I know that these words have helped us encapsulate and express how exciting, how new, and how different it is that we managed to hook up all of these computers to a network. They are exciting and exhilarating words. And they're no longer adequate.

I wouldn't presume to offer up a new vocabulary, and besides, that would defeat the purpose. After all, we're trying to move away from the top-down editorial model, here in new media. But some new words might help us get away from this idea that the Internet is a solipsistic and fundamentally Other place. Just calling it "cyberspace" makes it sound like a distorted, plastic landscape where nothing grows except fantastic cacti. Find new ways to talk about the Internet, and we might find ways to use it differently.

By asking for a new vocabulary, what I'm trying to say is, I don't even have the words to describe what it is that I — and the Computers/Internet team — want people to do online. We want to help people make the Internet something much more fun, much more useful, much more creative and fulfilling than TV. Computers/Internet will help you use this medium to express yourself, find each other, and integrate this thing called the Internet in a meaningful way into your lives. But we don't want you to replace your block parties with chat-rooms, your time with friends with e-mail conversations. Computers/Internet is not about living inside your hard drive. It's about incorporating what you do every day — at your job, in your apartment, on your street — with what you see on your computer screen, in a way that makes sense to you.

The options are limitless. We don't have all of the answers on how best to make Computers/Internet part of your life in a productive, meaningful way. What we do have is a lot of helpful suggestions, a lot of tools, and some entertaining and interesting stuff to read along the way.

Build a homepage, and then tell us and everybody else what it was like. No matter how many people have already trumpeted the birth, death, and resurrection of the Internet, the fact remains that the vast majority of people haven't integrated it into their lives yet. So each time someone does, it's valid, new and exciting.

All of which means that we here at Computers/Internet want you all to come up with the next generation of Internet words. Please, don't cut out on your coffee date to build your homepage. You might want to cut down on the Must See TV... but that's your call. As for summarizing this new way of being online? this new integrated existence that incorporates the Internet into a healthy way of extending your identity?

I don't know. You tell me.

Michelle Chihara, former Computers/Internet's editor, takes the Web personally. Although she works on the cutting edge of new media, she has only just discovered knitting and Rockabilly.

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