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From Bet Alwin, Editorial Director:

"I surf the real world." That's what's written on one of the magnets I've put on the metal trim in my Tripod office in Williamstown. It's right next to the magnet that says, "http://www.get.a.life.com." I bought the two magnets at the same time and, at first, I thought they were funny — humorous commentaries on the tremendous amount of time that people are spending on the Internet, these days.

But now, I'm not so sure.

You see, since joining Tripod two months ago to head up the Editorial department, I've been collecting magnets to decorate my space within Tripod's 150-year-old factory setting in the Berkshires. Each week, I find more: Most of them are related to computers, communication, words and pictures, and art. Makes sense for someone in my position as a creator of the digital future, right?

Before I came to Tripod, I had a line clearly drawn in my mind between virtual reality (i.e. anything on the Web) and real life. There was "cyberspace," sort of suggesting an eerie outer space — and then there was the real world, a place where people meet and talk and live and love. Now, I'm working here, literally helping to create the future; and I sense that line becoming fuzzy, even disappearing altogether. At Tripod, I'm having my first experience of an office of employees all choosing e-mail as their preferred means of communication. No one here uses the telephone internally — ever. When we have a thought, we reach for our keyboards. Is this just an electronic future we're making or is it the real future? Is what happens on the Web between people real life or is it an illusion? This is why I'm not so sure the slogans on the magnets are only jokes.

Bill Gates has written a new book that refers to the Internet as a "digital nervous system," and e-commerce as "business @ the speed of thought." This latter phrase is the book's title and you can find it at www.barnesandnoble.com. With evolving software technologies, we can now work and create as fast as we can think. I love metaphors and I find Gates's compelling. They are metaphors about the human body. Can't get any more real than that — than people.

I'm starting to look underneath all the text links, content, GIFs, applets, pixels, streaming video, and rich media and, guess what I'm turning up? People.

The Web grows more complex every minute. Still, "complexity" doesn't necessarily mean confusing, complicated, or disordered. Quite the opposite, a system may be said to be complex when it has evolved to a higher level of networked capacity, and balances diversity and integration. An excellent example of a complex system is the human body. Though it's made up of a mind-boggling number of parts, they are all interconnected, and they function in harmony, resulting in far greater capabilities. An even greater example is all of humanity — the complex network of diverse communities completely integrated possibly for the first time in history, through the 'Net.

So, when two or more people talk over the phone, is that conversation real, or only an illusion? Of course, it's real and it's really happening. The same for communication via computer, then. However, the capabilities of computers are far superior to what telephones can do.

I know the Web is the real world and then some — and I will no longer think of it as a virtual world — because I find everything there, for better and for worse:

• Communities of every stripe and language chatting in their own rooms and checking out what other communities may be chatting about
• Isolated individuals connecting by posting homepages for the first time
• People going on dates and magic-carpet rides online, then meeting and marrying
• Someone looking to buy something
• Someone looking to sell
• Porn, obscure music, bad writing, and over 1,400 hate sites (at someone's last count)
• The world's greatest literature and music to enjoy and the world's finest art museums to tour
• Images of faraway places to visit and beautiful hotel rooms to book
• NASA photos of Mars
• The daily news in sound and video segments telegraphed, in real time, from around the world
• Users and Internet addicts
• 12-Step recovery meetings online
• Hits (in this context, a good thing)
• Shameless advertising
• Net ethics and unethical spam
• Wall Street on a stick ('er, monitor)
• The creation of total environments
• The transmission of culture(s)

I wonder how we will make the Web world - the real world - much better than the earthly one we have already known. It is, after all, a grand projection of ourselves. I ponder if there's software and hardware that can come up with something finer than the experience of touch.

At Tripod, I'm working on the wild edge, but it's the inside edge. I'm just one real 40-something person. I'm really here and I'm staring in amazement at this magical medium - the box with all the people inside.

Surfing the real world,

Bet
www.got.a.life.com

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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