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Web-World? What on Earth are You Talking About

by jacob Ørsted nielsen

Scene one :

Man spends most of his day in the woods. Man says: "My good Lord, it's one big wood world!"

Scene two:

Man spends most of his day in front of a monitor. Man says: "Christ, it's one big screen world!"

I am sitting here on a chair in northern Europe, actually in the capital of a tiny country called Denmark. I sit most of the day in front of my screen, trying to finish off my Master’s thesis so I can end my seven years at university in this welfare state and get a real job. Towards what some are calling 'adult cosmos', which includes being productive, earning your own money, to become successful in life. But, believe me, it’s a tough one--sitting on a chair all day--in front of a screen filled with academic words and tons of footnotes.

So every now and then I glance at my modem and click the button that leads to a satellite link up. And I become 'on-line'. I send a mail or two. I receive one or two. I pay a visit to a couple of sites, usually the same as yesterday, just to see what my friends have been up to during the last twenty-four hours. As the end ritual I browse around my own little web occupation, thinking: “It looks really cool,” and dreaming of a screen the size of a movie theatre screen for all humans to experience and to see.

Then I hang up and I become 'off-line'.
It's a bit like dying, I must say, every time. Once again the screen is filled with these very long academic sentences. My own words. Just hanging there on the window. The cursor is blinking. Youth is passing. I do not touch the keyboard, but push my chair out and look out of the real window. It's grey outside. Cloudy. Yesterday I thought that I could sense a bit of spring in the air but maybe it was just me.
From my chair I can see other people moving about in their apartments. I can even spot a few monitors glowing. What are they up to with their machines? Playing games, writing essays, painting, chatting, surfing?

Then I think of Copenhagen, the place where I live. I think of how we chose to organize this city. Big buildings with a lot of two- or three-roomed flats. Thousands of people live here in my neighbourhood. They used to go to the factory just nearby in early urban-hood. It was all very practical. For them and for the manager at the factory--housing the workforce like this. At that time your next-door neighbour was perhaps a fellow worker--a friend from work. You would walk together every morning to get to the factory and walk back to your wife and kids in the late afternoon. Dirty, smelly and exhausted. But at least it was home.

A hundred years later the only exhausting thing about 'work' is the sore fingertips, the aching back and the tired eyes. My friends have even started to talk about that they feel more 'home' in front of the screen than they actually do at 'home'. Or rather, they mail me about those feelings. And I reply: "It's going to happen to us all if you don't throw your machine out of the window. Think about it. Try to think about the possibilities of the return of pen and paper."

I look out the window and the clouds are drifting. A tiny opening allows some sun into my eyes and reflects onto the screen. I can see myself, sitting there in front of it all. In front of the possibilities of a united web-world. A universe of on and off, buttons and blinking banners and nude women and if you click this: "Get your penis-enlargement here for free." But I don't, because I want to walk on this Internet path and maintain a little bit of innocence. Instead I walk into a room where the girls are barely over fourteen. I get confused because they look like some of the girls I saw on a different site two months ago, but then again--here it's hard to keep track of what's seen or what's just out of dream-world. It's an interfusion of fake and real. Where am I? In web-world or dream-world? In urban-world or “it's just the beginning of virtual space travel”-world.

I hang up and I return to my academic paper. It's upon 60s late-avant-garde writers in Denmark--a time where the whole of Europe is depressed after the insane years of war and bomb dropping. The US government has just been injecting thousands of dollars into the continent to have it re-built. The speed of change in urban modernity is felt. One of the writers makes an experiment with a computer. He feeds it with words and out comes some randomly created poems. It gets printed and reviewed. "How odd," the critics say. "What on earth has this to do with poetry?" The writer himself is terrified. He must be. A sign system that once served the one and only purpose--to bring the masses the words of God--is now ruled and structured by the possibilities of a chip. Technology wrote his debut collections of poetry. It was in 1965.

35 years later I do the same. It was last week. A friend from London attached a poetry lab pc program in a mail. I tried it out. "My" poem was very funny. I laughed at it's silly random out-puts. The sun was shining and I could even see myself smiling, satisfied with the identity of a “poet”. I was truly high on random words, but at the same time there was a huge contrast to my use of words in the academic paper. Surreal word-play versus my own ability of “explanations” and logical-rational-academic arguments. To narrow it down, yes, to explain the horror of a Danish writer in the 1960s--as he experienced the early text-generator, the first-born word-manipulator. The thing, the chip that could generate more 'new' poems than any other human writer could dream of, asleep or awake.

I shut down my computer and grab a little piece of paper. "Mankind is about to lay its future destiny into the hands of a mother chip. Mother is becoming a 1000 Mhz robot in a gene lab. Father is the guy with the glasses who clicks those buttons."

In year 3000, there will be a small historical note about the early 21st century, describing the invention of a small plastic-metal thing that had the ability to remember. The history books will tell a story of the rise of the nerds and the so-called Imperial Programmers. Bill Gates won't even be mentioned, but I will. Jacob Ørsted Nielsen, one of the few people who survived the diabolic virus in year 2062.

Total eclipse, but the sun was still shining.

I check my mail.

It's from my good friend Andrew, the writer: "Jacob, just let them take yer brain out and place it in a jar in front of the screen. You'll have to use the eye-blink method to navigate the mouse, but at least you won't get an aching butt or back." Once again I find myself amused. The machine is really speaking to me.

Jacob Ørsted Nielsen is a 27-year-old Dane. He plugged a modem to his machine late August 1999 and has been dominated by web-world ever since. Feel free to enter his personal wood-world at http://www.kriskrug.com/anport. Don't forget to say 'cheese' when you hit the front page.