Summarised from an article by John Perry Barlow entitled 'Is there a there in cyberspace?' from Utne Reader (Mar '95; subs $28 from LENS Publishing Co Inc, 1624 Harmon Place, Minneapolis MN 55403, tel 612 338 5040, e-mail info@utnereader.com or subscribe / donate to Utne Reader magazine by going to their website at www.utne.com/subscribe/gifts/friends).
Cyberspace, for all its current deficiencies and failed promises, is not without some very real solace already.
Some months ago, the great love of my life, a vivid young woman with whom I intended to spend the rest of it, dropped dead of undiagnosed viral cardiomyopathy two days shore of the 30th birthday. I felt as if my own heart had been as shredded as hers.
We had lived together in New York city. Except for my daughters, no one from Pinedale had met her. I needed a community to wrap around myself against colder winds than fortune had ever blown at me before. And without looking, I found I had one in the virtual world.
On the WELL [electronic online service], there was a topic announcing her death in one of the conferences to which I posted the eulogy I had read over her before burying her in her own small town of Nanaimo, British Columbia. It seemed to strike a chord among the disembodied living on the Net. People copied it and sent it to one another. Over the next several months I received almost a megabyte of electronic mail from all over the planet, mostly from folks whose faces I have never seen and probably never will.
They told me of their own tragedies and what they had done to survive them. As humans have since words were first uttered, we shared the second most common human experience, death, with an open-heartedness that would have caused grave uneasiness in physical America, where the whole topic is so cloaked in denial as to be considered obscene. Those strangers, who had no arms to put around my shoulders, no eyes to weep with mine, nevertheless saw me through. As neighbours do.
We are going into cyberspace whether we want to or not. In five years, everyone who is reading these words will have an e-mail address, other than the determined Luddites who also eschew the telephone and electricity.
When we are all together in cyberspace we will see what the human spirit, and the basic desire to connect, can create there. I am convinced that the result will be more benign if we go there open-minded, open-hearted and excited with the adventure, than if we are dragged into exile.
And we must remember that going to cyberspace, unlike previous great emigrations to the frontier, hardly requires us to leave where we have been. Many will find, as I have, a much richer appreciation of physical reality for having spent so much time in virtual reality.
Despite its current (and perhaps in some areas permanent) insufficiencies, we should go to cyberspace with hope. Groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind that counts.
In memoriam, Dr Cynthia Horner (1964-1994).
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