cyberspace | Lucky Otters Haven

One thing about the cyber-world that bugs me is its unstable, temporary nature. You can get really close to someone online and feel like you’ve been best friends for years, but because you don’t really know anything about them (their real name, where they live, what their favorite color is, etc.), if they suddenly take down their blog or just stop posting anything in it, there’s no way to find out what happened to them. Did they die? Are they in jail? Sick? Hard drive attacked by a virus? Abducted by aliens? Just don’t want to blog anymore?

There’s no way to ever find out, and it sucks because you’ve grown to care so much about the soul behind the words, even if you couldn’t recognize them if they were walking down the street. This goes for frequent commenters too, who are very active for awhile and then suddenly vanish. Only in that case, you also wonder if they might have grown bored with your blog or if you said something that pissed them off.

The Internet is a wonderful and terrible thing. It opens doors and slams them shut. It builds up and destroys. It educates and dumbs down. It lies and tells the truth. It’s a balance of dark and light, good and evil, alpha and omega. Cyberspace is a parallel universe that opens up when you touch your keyboard.

The Internet is a free-for-all. Anything can happen. It’s always evolving, always changing…for better or worse, you never know. And it’s still mostly free.

Oh, and there’s plenty of cats too.

I always thought of the Internet as comparable to being set loose in New York City during its most dangerous and exciting years–the 1970s and 1980s. You never knew what you would see, what sort of wonderful or terrible things could happen. It was a glorious chaos during that time. I know, I lived there then.

I hope the Internet is never “cleaned up” the way New York City was during the 1990s. I don’t want a Disneyland Internet.