A CHILD OF CYBERSPACE
by
Keith Taylor
posted May 26, 1999
Although my birth predated the invention of the computer by many decades, I ended up a child of cyberspace. As a cyberspace child I’ll either turn seventy or minus thirty next year—depending upon whether they get my Y2K bugs worked out. So here I am driving down the middle of the information highway, turn signals a’blinking, wondering if my next vehicle might be a baby carriage. I’m also wondering if this old dog will need to keep on learning new tricks.
Well cyberspace is going to be a fascinating place for dogs of all ages. We may charge into the space age at warp speed, bringing new technology to setters, sniffers, and those of us who pee on trees. On the other hand, we may learn that time does indeed run backwards thanks to a silly computer programming short cut, and we may find ourselves chasing newfangled things called automobiles.
Either way it’ll be interesting, and the trick will be to figure but which way we are going. Perhaps today’s internet will give us some hints. Take Lucianne Goldberg’s windows (http://www.iseelucy.com/) for example—they’re real windows BTW, not a Bill Gates operating system. I just tore myself away from watching them for about ten hours—or, maybe it was just ten minutes, one loses track of time looking at Lucy’s windows.
They just sit there, unmoving, an air conditioner protruding out of one. Some might wonder why anybody would put up a site with pictures of unimpressive air conditioners. Why, it is an important defense of the constitution according to the owner of the site, Michael Moore. Moore is the star of the TV show The Awful Truth. He feels Ms. Goldberg violated the fourth amendment when she urged Linda Tripp to tape Monica Lewinsky’s lurid accounts of her affair with the president. Moore says until Lucianne apologizes to Clinton and the nation for that invasion of privacy and also promises to read the fourth amendment, he will keep the cameras trained on her place.
Which way are we going with Moore and Goldberg, forward or backwards? Maybe it’s too early to tell. What if Lucianne stomps Moore to death, live and on the web? Even that wouldn’t be something new. Death in cyberspace has been done. So has giving birth. Even procreation isn’t unheard of. They tell me depictions of it on the porno sites are old hat; modesty keeps me from checking it out of course.
What’s new then? Deflowering of a maiden that’s what. And we almost had that. A while back an entrepreneur named Ken Tipton advertised he would show it live, and lively. It had everybody all a’twitters. According to the pre-coital hoopla, a young lass would lose her virginity right before our eyes. Now would that be a thing for the millennium or not? You could get an argument either way in our house. My wife doesn’t think I’m old enough yet to watch such a thing. Maybe that’ll change after I become a septuagenarian, if I do.
In any case the blessed boinking didn’t happen, another case of hype over substance. Some things don’t change much online or IRL.
But some things do. The terms we use to describe things for example. If we move any further into cyberspace we’re going to need help with definitions, especially definitions of acronyms. Those short cuts are indispensable aids to technology. World War II was won only because we learned to cope with the immensity of it with the acronym "SNAFU." By the time my war (the Korean) came along "FUBAR" was added.
A high-tech web site at www.mtnds.com/af/ will help you cope with the plethora of those funny words. It has some 90,000 of them listed and you even can add your own. I know the whole world will be interested to know that SNAFU has only one definition while the more recent FUBAR has six. You might win a bet with the knowledge that ACRONYM itself has thirteen explanations, BIT twenty-nine, and BYTE only three.
If you want to know what important people said about important things, try Familiar Quotations by Bartlett at www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett/. Okay so it’s the ninth edition and was published in 1901. But, hey man, it’ll be a year ahead of schedule if the Y2K thing sends us careening backwards like they tell us.
If we do go backwards, grammarians won’t have to fuss over whether "To boldly go where no man has gone before" violates some arcane rule against split infinities. Hey, there’s even a web site for things like that. The country’s leading grammarian, Richard Lederer has his own web site www.pobox.com/~verbivore. If Lederer’s site doesn’t show what you want, send him an email and he’ll answer you personally. That’s space age technology combined with good old early twentieth century courtesy. BTW, Lederer, like Roddenberry, has no problem with split infinitives—only with the folks who fuss over them. He also says "email," without the hyphen will be the cyberspace spelling of that word.
Lederer is heading toward the 21st century whether anybody else is or not. I’m think I’ll tag along. Ya gotta like a guy who can remove an annoying hyphen from a word. Anyhow, once through this confusing world is enough.
Email Dipsey Dumpster
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johneeo@rcn.com
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