The static buzz. Millions of electrons hit the screen and a world is compiled, arranging itself into two, neat dimensions.
Libraries of knowledge, cultures, emotions, and lives are virtually stored here. A break in the system, a crash of computers, will bring down the real world like a tonne of bricks. A cause to panic will hit in a wave of disorder-- has hit as Y2K--to show virtual reality tightly interwoven with "real" reality. Is their relationship a mutually supportive marriage or a parasite? The latter depends on whether you're the addictive personality. Will it take you away from the real, swallow up your day, or simply be a harmless tool to enable navigating with a sharper focus, more resolution, through queries and plans?
Will it let you circumvent obstacles and open doors in an array of opportunities floating around in the white sea of shared consciousness? Or will you close the door to your room and indulge in the hidden, forbidden, and lucrative parts of the web? Hide out in the cracks and crevices, where the bad things lurk and mesmerizingly beckon you... will they keep you there for long, in the private safety of your own darker side?
The internet is a double-edged sword.
It's also the best thing since sliced bread. It's limitless, transcending oceans to let your message reach other souls instantly. We'd like to think it's private: when we bank, when we pour our heart out in blogs. We'd like to think there's a web police making sure the sharks with their codes and fins don't steal pins as they swim through. Sweet talking JAVA or C++ and the computer languages that open up, to them, all the doors. History itself becomes a faint ghost, like a fading mist of smoke which inhabits the system, as we reminisce about Trojan horses while checking for spyware. No longer can we grasp that this history existed as an experience more real than the virus in our computer.
Friendship can come in bulk, intimacy can be found through a search engine, and we become a set of categories-- boxes clicked with a checkmark; Female. Single. Toronto.
It's hard sometimes to exit the trance and join the living. Constrictions of a monitor aside, you can be anybody, live anywhere, and do anything. At least in your mind... But how can you get more real than that anyway?
Life without the internet would sux0rs. How else could we put smileys at the end of our sentences, spell "l33t", cyber stalk on facebook, and answer pressing questions in the blink of an eye? On the other hand, how else can we write an essay about Napoleon and think it's medieval icecream? How else can we type in our headache symptoms into a search engine, be told its a stroke or cancer, and suffer a figurative heart attack?
Enter life without the internet: It's just like real life... if you Update the version, Insert fantasy, and don't even bother trying to Esc.