Ppl Suck LOL

On September 11th 2001 I went into a chat room, seeking conversation with US people about the shocking and appalling terrorist attack. The line above was written by a 14 year old youngster, using the abbreviated language of cyberspace. People suck. Laugh out loud.

She said that her brother was in the marines and had telephoned her parents to say it was serious, and if they did not see him again, he loved them. She was trying to understand the world she lives in and articulate it in a variant form of English, to someone living in the UK that she has never seen and will never meet. I explained to her that the world is sometimes a very sick place. As she gets older, she will understand it for herself. I hope her brother returns.

During the Tiannamen Square massacre, Chinese students were online and talked live to people in the West about what was happening. The web suddenly became a medium with extraordinary political dimensions.

Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML and is arguably the founder of the world-wide web. Certainly, he made a substantial contribution to it and continues to influence the direction it takes in his work at www.w3.org. He has this to say:

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.

I share this vision, and also recognise that the web is increasingly dominated not by community minded individuals, but by huge corporate interests. Yet the fact remains, it is available to anyone with a computer, modem and telephone line. The address of my personal web site is as easily remembered and as quick to type as the address of Microsoft or AOL. Compared to these giants, I am less than an ant. But paradoxically in cyberspace, in many respects, I am equal to them.

Cyberspace has many paradoxes. The BBC reported that the terrorists made extensive use of the Western technology they despise, to plan their attack: digital communications like the mobile phone and Internet. There are further paradoxes of a more subtle and philosophical nature.

Millions of people have found that online interaction engages their emotions in a peculiar way. It is common for people to attach emotional value to their online exchanges, yet ultimately those exchanges are no more than typing on a keyboard in front of a monitor. There was a well publicised incident a few years ago concerning what has been called 'cyber-rape'. One person manipulated the online image of another, forcing it into unwanted sexual acts. It was an unprecedented occurrence, and the members and witnesses in this particular multi-user domain did not know how to feel about or how to respond. Nor did the administrators who managed the 'virtual environment'. In one sense, using the term 'rape' was wildly inaccurate and ethically irresponsible. In another sense, the woman concerned was genuinely upset and her experience could not be dismissed. When we try to understand and conceptualise cyberspace, language is important.

This example illustrates some of the complexities that 'cyberspace' presents to us. It does not have a location, yet in some sense is a 'space' - of the mind only. Some people project religious and spiritual aspiration onto this fact; that it is a domain where we are less encumbered with restrictions of geography, physical characteristics and even gender.

Presenting yourself as the opposite gender seems to be a popular experiment. Adopting different but same-sex identities is another. We can understand this in different ways. One question to ask is what kind of effect it has on people, when they do this. For some, it gives them a form of expression that is psychologically beneficial, or just ordinary fun. For others, perhaps unstable to start with, their online identities interfere with their perception of reality and undermine their ability to cope with life.

Some people suggest that 'cyberspace' is a reflection of contemporary conditions. In post-modernist theory, personal identity is regarded as a fluid and arbitrary invention, as are all forms of knowledge. There are no signposts, only relative choices. The Internet - they say - is exactly like this. You can be who ever you like, and no one will ever know.

Online interaction is an intriguing psychological experience; it has become part of daily life for millions of people. In the US in particular, students spend many hours online, using the fast, no-charge connection that their colleges provide. It is a phenomenon worthy of cultural analysis. And there are a new generation who are growing up with the Internet and finding that they can have digital conversations with distant people, about subjects they cannot yet comprehend and, unfortunately, have to endure.