Malachi

My first nephew was born a few weeks ago. One often hears the cliché "the Internet generation" in the media these days. In Malachi's case it is true.

Living and working now in the United States, I was unable to be with my family until the weekend after Malachi's birth. However, I was able to see pictures of him only hours after he was born. Malachi's first few minutes after entering the world were recorded via digital camera and posted on the Internet by his grandfather.

With the growth and spread of the Internet over the past decade, we've seen the birth of a new understanding of humanness. Malachi's generation will be the first to experience the affect of this firsthand. I can empathize with Malachi's first few hours of life in this new world. I imagine his take went something like this: "What the heck kind of craziness is this place?"

Like Malachi, I am struggling to understand what the new world of interconnected bits and bytes means. I'd have to agree with him that if anything, it's rather odd.

I had firsthand experience of the weirder side of the Internet a few weeks ago.

Into my *spark-online e-mail inbox arrived a letter:

Dear Robert,

Greetings from the Philippines! HI! you mite be surprised where did i get your email address, anyway, i have nothing to do here in the office and suddenly it impressed into my mind to type my name in yahoo search engine. i was surprised to know that I have a same name in the Internet, btw, im Robert "bob" C. Delamar, 29, Bacolod City, Philippines, working as an Computer Instructor in St. John's Institute. Robert i tried visiting your website, what is it all about? (just asking) till here...God bless and More Power!

Robert Delamar

I couldn't resist, so I sent a reply. It turns out that my alter ego, Robert C. Delamar, is a pretty nice guy. He was as baffled as I was that another person shared his name. A Caucasian fellow living on the other side of the world in Canada no less.

When I was a kid I wondered what it would be like to be born in a different culture. To be of a different ethnicity. Thanks to the Internet, weeks shy of my twenty-fifth birthday, I found the answer.

Robert Delamar also exists in the Philippines. Asian, not bad looking. Curious about himself and the world. He enjoys writing random e-mail to strangers in foreign countries when he doesn't have much to do at the office.

Not that different from the Canadian version.

Timothy Leary

Malachi has no concept of what the Internet is, and yet he exists on it. I had no idea that someone else in the world shared my name, now thanks to the Internet I do. These realities fall within the realm of odd or weird tales from the birth of the Internet generation. Yet, the Internet is more than odd or weird, it is often bizarre.

Case in point, the death of Timothy Leary.

What the heck was Timothy Leary thinking when he decided to broadcast his death on the Internet? I suppose this is the fact about the Internet that baffles me more than anything else. It is the random accessibility of information uncoupled from context. A few years ago, the LSD pioneer and technology neophyte Timothy Leary decided that when he dropped off this sphere he'd do it with the whole world watching. Thus, the deathcam. His life ended while the world looked on via the World Wide Web.

Yet, I suppose Leary's death broadcast is no more bizarre than the fact that the Internet itself -- a complicated interconnection of electrical boxes that store data -- has been distorted to appear as nothing less than the salvation for all of humanity's frailties.

The Internet, the supposed fountain of enlightenment that soothsayers predicted in its early, heady days has not yet materialized. In the place of a utopian form of communication, we find ordinary human beings faced with the reality of their existence.

The adjectives "odd" and "bizarre" are simply attempts to describe what the mirror is reflecting back at us.

Birth. Life. Death. All interconnected attributes of the same object. What it means to be.

We created the Internet and it has in turn created us.

Copyright © 2000 Robert Delamar. All Rights Reserved.

Robert F. Delamar is twenty-five years old and struggling to understand the purpose of arbitrary things like numbers. He is the alter ego of the Managing Editor of *spark-online.

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