It is safe to assert that I have grown up with, if not actually within, the internet. Like my earliest memories of life, my earliest memories of it are ill-formed and without any particular narrative. In elementary school, my class was walked through the process of acquiring an email address. The rationale for the then-novel exercise was that we would use our creatively chosen (read: ridiculous) "@hotmail.com" addresses to turn in electronic homework. In the neighbourhood of 8-10 years old at this time and with a level of web naivete (indeed, naivete in general!) which may be approaching extinction barely more than a decade later, myself and my colleagues rapidly fell prey to the most primal of internet predators; the chain letter. Complete with some of the most ruthless child-centric invocations for propagation (impending death, death of parents, siblings, animals, etc.), it was disturbingly contagious. As I recall with, no doubt, some embellishment, inboxes swelled to capacity as the exponential growth of asexually reproducing electronic messages overcame our essentially closed (save for probably a critical leak!) system of 20-30 children. Even as a child, I was begrudged to admit that the teacher's last-ditch effort to save our early e-lives was a comfort. Now I look back on her promise to save us from the chain letter's threats of death and destruction as as much a keen attempt to cure the epidemic using the same emotional and outlandish claims in reciprocation as it was the last gasp of a failed effort. We, the internet and I, have aged and grown in complexity (notice the purposeful avoidance of "matured") but I would be hard-pressed to say the song does not remain the same.
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| Like this, but with more chain letter |
Onward from that Lord of the Flies of the fledgling internet era, the next episode is less ripe for analogy with any classical morality piece and that is precisely the important point. Whereas chain letters have been successfully spread in the pre-internet era, Napster hid the mechanics of early file sharing in a veil of simplicity and an overwhelming abundance of free music. Surely piracy has been present before, even to children, with all the same moral ambiguity and controversy. Although it may have an apt place in a cycle of piracy and avenues for controversial and variously unpaid or "mis-paid" distribution schemes, Napster is perhaps the definitive, the resonant entry in this cycle. As has come to be a rule with the internet, ease of use and ease of distribution make moral ambiguities like the one posed by Napster especially ambiguous. Not only can something become rapidly mainstream but it can do so without any particular requirement for an understanding participant. It was not until I had already grown very attached, along with many of my colleagues in elementary school, to this new convenient musical distribution service that I even began to comprehend how the files were being proliferated and consider whether this was ethical. And to this, add anonymity and ubiquity. Then, as has become more clear in the evolution of the internet, add that the internet has become such a presence as to really and truly change the content of this and other debates. The accessibility and ubiquity of information, indeed of everything "not physical", non-negligibly changes it.
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| Napster |
But Napster was just a microcosm of the internet. At the same time, families were bringing the internet into their homes with no apparent conception of the vastness, the moral ambiguities, the hearts of darkness and frustratingly beautiful potential it represented. Parents take their kids to the supermarket and watch them clamour over the candy and potato chips. On the internet, which is the essentially unsupervised (regardless of attempts one way or another) supermarket for literally everything else, pornography, piracy and profanity are potato chips. It is marvellous to think how thick the skin of the mind must be, now that we have grown up with the internet and borne witness to the darkest hearts and most ridiculous corners of humanity from, in all likelihood, the family living room. It is precisely this diversity and scope of morality and content that, far more accessible than potato chips from the corner store, makes it such an enigmatic behemoth. It is an extraordinary thing, as much as anything because it is so increasingly and actually ordinary. And to use but a single digital potato crisp, it is nothing if not really fucked up.
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| A whole new connotation to Lay's |
In the second part, I will recall some other aspects of the internet through anecdotes about a forum for making animated Lego movies, my short-lived-but-not-entirely-unpleasant stay in the world of Azeroth and even Facebook. Also: humor on the internet is a bit odd.
