From a Series of Tubes

[quislet]

INT. BEDROOM NIGHT

The camera opens on the interior of an upstairs bedroom.  The camera pans right across the room, noting bookcase, a jacket hung on a chair, a window framing a tree outside, a quilted bed and a desk with chair.  Zooming in, a futuristic typewriter sits on the desk, with something like a small television screen where the paper should be.  Then the camera backs out to reveal Rod Serling in his characteristic black suit, standing next to the desk.

SERLING’S VOICE

Imagine for a moment that you live in a world where
you can communicate instantly with your friends and
family through a device like this one.  Anywhere
across the country, anywhere on the planet, they
read your message on the screen as you type the
keys.  You write shared conversations with them in
text as commonly as you would speak with them on
the telephone.  Now imagine that you were born into
this world, that this text-speak is a normal, everyday
part of your life, your friendships, your loves. 
Imagine that you even have relationships built on
this instantaneous correspondence with people half
a world away, people that you’ve never met in person. 
Tonight’s journey will be into this world built on text,
into the faceless world of...

I am a citizen of the Internet.  When I was in school, I dabbled on bulletin board systems, dialed up systems at different schools to post messages and download files.  In my freshman year of college, my universe expanded with Usenet, Gopher and email.  I rifled through documents at schools around the world to do my research.  When I came back to school, someone had slapped graphics onto everything and now I had to fight for space in the computer lab, competing against mindless web-surfers for a computer to play Adventure from.  I’ve been on the Internet for about as long as any of you have, and I do a lot of my working and playing here, but I’ll never be a native.  I’m a first-generation, naturalized citizen.  My netticisms will always carry at least a hint of an antiquated accent of the old country, IRL.  To me, the Internet will always be a monument to humanity’s ingenuity, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a series of tubes through which we snigger at Al Gore and implicitly reference those Luddite days of yore when we had to lick stamps to send mail.

My daughters, however, have been raised with hot and cold running Internet all their lives.  They’ve had computers in their bedrooms ever since they could type.  They’ve had online friends that they’ve never met in person, since elementary school.  The Internet is normal to them, a simple fact of life like air, water, cable TV and duck confit.  I’ve loved watching them swim in an online world that will never feel wholly natural to me.  I mean, I know my way around the ‘net as well as any of you do, but there are things the girls do that make me feel old.  My ichiban has completed almost two full years of college gen eds online.  I remember watching, dumbstruck, as I realized that my niiban was spending night after night in what is basically a drawing-chat program, collaborating on sketch after sketch with online friends as naturally as I might carry on a rambling stream-of-consciousness IM conversation with you.  They have both built some of the deepest relationships of their young lives online, their “imaginary friends” morphing into old-school, in-person friends, and then sometimes even moving into my house.

But it was this last weekend that took the cake.  The niiban’s Internet boyfriend came to visit.  For the first time.  Ever.  From Canada.  They’ve been “dating” online for some months, spending hours together in IM, on Skype, on their Homestuck community site, swapping .mp3 files of tracks they’ve recorded to mix them into duets.  They had worked out that he should come down and visit.  He’s a few years older, and is more mobile than she is.  As the plans began to take shape, both of them checked in with their parents.  As for the niiban, we’ve met her imaginary friends before.  Two of them currently live in my guest room in a Neil Simon meets Avenue Q sort of way.  She’s always done well, and she’s earned our trust.  She’s shown that she is a good judge of character, particularly over the Internet, and she chooses her online friends very well.

The boyfriend’s folks are a little older, a little less immersed in the online world than my house is.  They had the perfectly reasonable concern that his teenage hottie across the border might not be what she purports to be.  She might, in fact, be some some scary middle-aged guy that’s trolling for Canadian boys.  So, Dad decides to come along for the ride, more as a safety net than as a chaperone.  A few days in, he realizes that this scenario looks about the same on our side, except with him in the role of scary middle-aged guy.  This begins the saga of online parental communication, with Dad emailing ginger_rose, ironing out logistical details that the kids never thought to nail down while at the same time building an increasing confidence on both sides that the other person is who they advertise to be.  They arrived, it was delightful, the kids went to Katsucon, Dad and I cooked brunch.  He made his mother’s Viennese potato dumplings to go with my eggs in purgatory.  Every night turned into a jam session that started with the two kids on a few duets and then other voices and instruments joining in from all around the house.  Dad and the kids spent Monday in the District strolling around monuments and museums.  We're already planning a full-family return visit this summer.

It was all so incredibly normal.  Well, what passes for normal in my house, but it was so amazingly human.  There was a spontaneous recognition by pretty much everyone in the house of a relationship that bridged distance, was built on communication, and engendered great creativity.  At the same time, it was so weird!  But that’s my childhood IRL immigrant speaking.  These two kids had never met face to face before.  I’m sure there were some photos, both in cosplay and in street clothes.  I’d imagine there was some webcam that happened.  I think I gave her an old webcam…  But they’d never seen each other’s body language, breathed in the other’s pheromones.  They’d never touched.  The ritualized beginnings of their relationship were utterly alien to me. 

But then I remind myself that I’m no stranger to long distance.  Our engagement had ginger_rose and I literally on opposite sides of the planet (the only way to have been farther away would have been for me to be on the south side of the Mediterranean instead of the north).  For the better part of a year, we had only one phone conversation between us, and just a handful of international snailmail.  That foundation of enforced communication has served us well to this day.  We met in person, way back in high school, but the phase of our relationship in which we built some of our most important shared values was done in slow paper letters between Europe and the Pacific Islands. 

I guess I’m still just marveling at seeing the Internet extend into the physical plane as humanity evolves into a species that is also defined by its onlineness, even in my own house.  It’s a strange and beautiful thing.

Comments

[pyroguysr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, just wait until we get back into outer space. THEIR kids will be communicating with people on other planets and the grandkids will be chatting up alien species and the niiban will be the old grandma saying, "In MY day..." *LOL*

[satismagic.livejournal.com]

Whata beautiful, beautiful post! I only started working with a computer when I was about to start university, only got internet access a year later ... 1995/1996. For a long time the computer felt incredibly strange to me, I couldn't work with it creatively at all. Today my best friends live "in" the computer. One friend is almost like an office colleague -- another translator, but for technical stuff, not romance novels -- in northern Europe. I go hang out in Second Life with a friend from the US and a friend from Portugal, and I know that if I need to talk someone, there will always be a friend awake somewhere.

It's beautiful to live in the future like that!