Hello World

And the winner is...

Jonathan Kepple, for his thoughtful and honest response to "cybersex" in Section 22 Sex and Greed.

Thanks to everyone who commented and also those who sent informal backchannel responses about the book.

Jonathan, we hope you enjoy your copy of Hello World.

Best wishes

Raw Nerve

Audio excerpt: computer sleep

Page 14

Listen to this excerpt

...sitting at my writing table in the dark and very late, I work on a text lit only by a cluster of small lanterns swinging to the vibration of my hand moving across the paper. This stillness in the night can be like the stillness of online. It is the charm of midnight, the intimacy of the unconscious, to sit here knowing how many sleeping things are close by yet hidden from my view and to be aware that such quiet does not signal solitude, as it might in the daytime, but means simply that this part of the world is in suspension.

The language we have given our computers mirrors the language of slumber – hibernate, sleep, suspend. I’m surprised we don’t have command called ‘dream’ – after all, there is an equivalent, which is when you run a programme in the background. That must be the nearest a computer comes to dreaming. Or perhaps it’s dreaming when it is running a task like the Seti search for extra-terrestrial life . Most people only make use of a tiny percentage of their computers’ capacity, so applications like seti@home live in the spaces. While you sleep at night, your computer reads signals from deep space and looks for alien life forms. That sounds pretty much like dreaming to me.

Storage

Page 18

Now, my brain is a single node in a network of nodes. Information passes in, and out, and through it, all the time. Every day I’m asked for the answers to all kinds of questions, and every day I ask different questions of others. I provide opinions. Others provide them back. I can ask individuals by email or I can ask the world via a website. Why hold it all in my head? It would be impossible to do so anyway, but why bother? If I want to know anything, I just need to ask the web.

I've been giving away a lot of reference books recently, or selling them on Amazon. I just don't need many of them now that I have the web. Today I am about to take the following to the charity shop:

- The Hutchinson Encyclopedia in Full Colour 9th Edition 1990. hardback. pp 1,241. Very heavy. Haven't opened it since the kids grew up.

- Good Housekeeping Family Health Encyclopedia: the complete modern reference book for the home. 1989. Hardly ever looked at it anyway and certainly don't need it now there is so much updated medical information online.

- Everywoman's Medical Handbook. 1988. To be honest, this was never very useful.

I plan to do the BookCrossing thing at some point and release some books into the wild, but I never seem to be able to organise myself and the right book to be in the right place at the right time. Giving away books in public seems to be quite complicated!

Room #90943

Page 28

Warm and dry but shifting underfoot. This land used to be sea-bed but within the last hundred years it has been reclaimed, drained, and planted as new forest. It is littered with white sea-shells and dark pine-needles, both of which can slide between the toes and pierce the skin. Beyond the young trees lies a stretch of shallow water reflecting the summer sky and enclosed by the perfect line of a dike. There are few sounds here - just the occasional bird, or a distant car passing along the elevated road. Everything is geometrically regular: the water is at a constant depth of one metre; the dike is exactly the same width and height all the way along; the trees are equidistant and of the same species, although nature has created some variety of size. Everywhere you see only verticals, horizontals, and the spaces in between. A geometry of newness and calm.

The footnote to this appears as:

Derived from memories of childhood visits to Holland, and built as a virtual room #90943 at LambdaMOO.

The room number is incorrect. At one time I had a number of characters at LambdaMOO and used up a lot of quota. Inevitably different rooms were built by different characters and this one (called Sandforest) was originally built by Pinetree, who later expired when my computer was stolen and I lost all the passwords I had not previously memorised. With Pinetree went this room and everything else e had built, but I had saved the description and so was able to remake it. It can now be found at #103691

Mappa Mundi

Page 70
Now we are so connected that we must re-conceptualise what we mean by physical space...

Mappa Mundi is a great site for exploring the new geographies of the internet. It aims to "examine information discovery on the Internet via an eclectic mix of ideas about technology, history, and the future of cyberspace." At present it is being maintained in an archival format by Media.org. Check out the explanation of the Mappa Mundi logo describing how the three continents are replaced with the fundamental elements of cyberspace: red, green and blue. Perhaps this connects with Simon's notion of a Mandala?

Win a signed copy!

Impress the Raw Nerve team with your insights about virtual life and win a signed copy of Hello World.

Just post a comment in response to any of the blog entries and the team will choose the one which moves/excites/fascinates them the most.

All comments posted before midnight GMT Sunday 28 March 2004 are eligible.

14 Where are we?

Page 119

Traceroute is a technique used to follow this passage of data across the web. When the user sends an email, it is first broken down into packets which are then sent one-by-one to their destination. But they do not generally travel direct – they have to pass through hubs of exchange, and traceroute programs count how long the journey takes between each one. If a journey is particularly slow it means there are problems in that sector, and if a hub is out of service the data-packet will be seen to have not progressed beyond it. It is, effectively, stuck there until it finds another route onwards. For a system with no physical geography, the net is extraordinarily good at mapping itself, and a traceroute report builds its own cultural and poetic landscape.

Experiment with traceroute here. If you know your IP address you can enter it in the box - otherwise just use the one provided, and select a location from the checklist.

"cyber sex"

Page 183

Online computer users often engage in what is affectionately known as "cyber sex." Often the fantasies typed into keyboards and shared through Internet phone lines get pretty raunchy. However, as you'll see below, one of the two cyber-surfers in the following transcript of an online chat doesn't seem to quite get the point of cyber sex. Then again, maybe he does...

I was first sent this hilarious account of cyber sex by Robin Rimbaud in the late 90s, and of all the jokes circulating on the net it still remains my second favourite.

My first favourite is badday.jpg, which is also mentioned in the book and can be found in Section 16 - Anxiety.

The English landscape

Page 21

One may liken the English landscape, especially in a wide view, to a symphony, which it is possible to enjoy as an architectural mass of sound … without being able to analyse it in detail or to see the logical development of its structure. The enjoyment may be real, but it is limited in scope and in the last resort vaguely diffused in emotion. But if instead of hearing merely a symphonic mass of sound, we are able to isolate the themes as they enter, to see how one by one they are intricately woven together and by what magic new harmonies are produced … then the whole effect is immeasurably enhanced. Only when we know all the themes and harmonies can we begin to appreciate its full beauty, or to discover in it new subtleties every time we visit it.
W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 20.

Unable to sleep, I get dressed and go downstairs. In the kitchen, the dog snores and the refrigerator turns itself on and off. The fire bubbles its gas-driven flames as the house machines hum. Beyond the curtains the street is black and deserted. Dogs everywhere are asleep. Prowlers prowl. Burglars burgle. Here is Dylan's night-time town of Llareggub brought alive again. He must have written that play through many darknesses like this one.

I put on my coat, close the front door quietly, and cross the dead street. It's a full moon tonight, and its beams bounce off the windows to light up odd crevices of the buildings. Only a few houses to pass and then I am through the gate and into the field. The groaning of the heavy metal five-bar wakes up some of the nearest sheep, who raise their heads sleepily and gaze around. I stand in the centre of the meadow and raise my face to the moon, which lights me as it lights everything else around. It’s good to be outside on such a night, but a little frightening too. I feel part of something but I’m not sure I understand what it is.

Every shape here is the product of something else. The course of the stream is dictated by the geology. The smooth ridges and furrows of the field were created by a hundred years of strip-ploughing. The hedges planted by humans, their forms bitten around by animals. The narrow tracks created by the daily passing of cleft hooves. In the daytime this field looks like bright green corduroy seamed with hawthorn and hemmed by water. Beneath each row of hedging the ground is brown and dead, suffocated by the heat of heavy lanolined bodies dozing in the shade during the day and dreaming their way through the night. Occasionally a ewe or a lamb does not awake – and then scavengers come to remove its eyes, its intestines, and the other softer parts. Generations of flies, or a farmer and a tractor, will dispose of the rest.

The stream cleanses the feet of two such meadows, each sloping down toward to the shallow running water where animals and trees dip to drink. Cress rises from the stones, willows bend and reach across. Sometimes, but rarely, children sit in the branches to drop boats made from leaves, twigs, paper and plastic into the sluggish current. Sheep come to scratch and nibble at the shoots they can reach, creating with their grazing an orderly and geometric topiary.

I walk for a while in the light and shade of the field, feeling the firmness of the turf beneath my feet and being very aware that I am only the most visible one of many presences moving through the domain of the night. Then, feeling the need for company, I go home and log on as a guest to join the throngs at LambdaMOO where I enter a different kind of darkness.

I am fascinated by the way the English landscape has been formed by the many farming and industrial practices of this country.

To find out more, see the BBC programme Land Lines and the organisation Common Ground.

Hello World: travels in virtuality by Sue Thomas

Hello World is the story of a life online. Part travelogue, part memoir, Sue Thomas draws on her online travels as well as her physical journeys in the USA, Australia, Spain and England. While the book is non-fiction, it is a direct descendent of Correspondence, Thomas’ extraordinary novel that also deals with the synergies between digital and physical worlds. Like its fictional counterpart, Hello World will trigger feelings in readers of both recognition and irritation and will stimulate debate on the nature of the physical in a wired world for years to come.

comments about Hello World:

" . . . an essential tour guide to the poetics of time, space and gender in the Information Age. A Baedeker to the cyber-realm." Carolyn Guertin

"Sue is a restless figure in a stationary world of words. Embracing digital media for its freedom and life beyond the physical page, her writings fuse the surfaces, textures, histories and interactions of our bodies and minds. She writes the stories of tomorrow, today." Robin Rimbaud / Scanner

" . . . engagingly and warmly written, Hello World combines first-person meditations with a wealth of information. Highly recommended for first-time users and those who want to try dipping their toes into the cyberwaters." N Katherine Hayles

"Sue Thomas has become one of the most innovative thinkers, promoters and facilitators on the Web." Stelarc

A word about physicality...
Since the body is generally absent in cyberspace, we were keen to involve it in the book. Hello World is designed to be pleasurably tactile. It's smaller than most paperbacks - 14.5cm wide x 16.5cm high - and fairly chunky at 2.25cm thick. The jacket is silky smooth. We hope you enjoy handling the volume as much as you enjoy reading it :)