Life in Cyberspace—Way Back When
Eleven years ago today, on February 8, 1996, 150 photojournalists across the globe joined to document the vast and vaguely defined new thing called “cyberspace.” Over 24 hours, they photographed Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn working on a website, lanky-haired Dutch twentysomethings smoking hashish in Internet cafes, and a robed Coptic monk clutching a laptop in an Egyptian desert to write e-mails to schoolchildren in Michigan.
“24 Hours in Cyberspace” was the brainchild of Rick Smolan, the former National Geographic photographer behind the popular “Day in the Life” series of coffee-table books. His production company, Against All Odds, coordinated the project. He said he was doing it because he wanted to “capture the human face of cyberspace.”
For 24 hours, the photographs were posted on a website where people could search all 200,000 images as well as add their own pictures and stories. Over the day the site was active, 4 million people visited it. “The speed and scale of this project are unprecedented,” Smolan told the press.
Far from a collection of bland snaps of monitors and hard drives, the resulting photographs and stories were moving, absurd, and frightening. In Annapolis, Maryland, a father with an autistic child found support in an online mailing group. In Portland, Oregon, look-alike strippers called the Lick Sisters promoted themselves on their self-designed site. In Toronto, Holocaust deniers celebrated their freedom to post anti-Semitic material. The vast catalogue of photos was subsequently edited down to a couple of hundred and published in a book, 24 Hours in Cyberspace.
“The Internet is passing through an awkward adolescence, rebellious and plagued by gawky interfaces, too-slow access times, and more than its share of pointless banality,” wrote Paul Saffo in his preface to the book. But the project was infused with near giddiness over the digital revolution. Saffo added, “Moreover, [cyberspace] is a shape-shifting, borderless medium firmly in the hands of ordinary citizens bent on turning it to extraordinary ends.”
In 1996 the World Wide Web still felt very new. The Internet had existed in at least primitive form since the late 1950s, but it hadn’t been accessible to everyday users until the Web became available in 1993. People were just beginning to understand the new medium’s powers and pitfalls. Schools were struggling to regulate their new Internet connections, public libraries fretted about the future of books, editorialists worried about “online-aholics” and when the Web would “mature,” and people wondered if the Internet would ever much affect politics.
That year the World Wide Web had approximately 40 million users; today the number is in the billions. A lot of the emerging trends the project documented in 1996 now seem almost everlasting. The “Open for Business” section of the book declared the Internet to be an “emerging marketspace.” By 2006 e-tailers reported more than $102.1 billion in sales.
The way news is consumed—and made—has dramatically changed in the 11 years since Smolan’s project. Today 40 percent of Americans say they get at least some of their news online. 24 Hours in Cyberspace called “online diaries” a “genre in the making”; today almost everyone is a blogger, and they not only comment on the news but make it, as when Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, in 1997, and when thesmokinggun.com revealed that James Frey had fabricated much of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, in 2006. YouTube was undreamt of even three or four years ago, yet it has already showed the world Virginia Sen. George Allen’s “macaca” remark and the comedian Michael Richards’s racist meltdown at a comedy club, among many other things.
What would “24 Hours in Cyberspace” look like if it were done again today? It would be a daunting undertaking, with nearly 30 times more Internet users out there now than in 1996. But it would probably find many of the same stories, with kids in classrooms clustering around a monitor, strippers at work behind their webcams, people browsing personal ads, and doctors searching databases for organ donors. It would also show that the Internet has grown exponentially, become far faster, more sophisticated—and basically ubiquitous.
“24 Hours in Cyberspace” was the brainchild of Rick Smolan, the former National Geographic photographer behind the popular “Day in the Life” series of coffee-table books. His production company, Against All Odds, coordinated the project. He said he was doing it because he wanted to “capture the human face of cyberspace.”
For 24 hours, the photographs were posted on a website where people could search all 200,000 images as well as add their own pictures and stories. Over the day the site was active, 4 million people visited it. “The speed and scale of this project are unprecedented,” Smolan told the press.
Far from a collection of bland snaps of monitors and hard drives, the resulting photographs and stories were moving, absurd, and frightening. In Annapolis, Maryland, a father with an autistic child found support in an online mailing group. In Portland, Oregon, look-alike strippers called the Lick Sisters promoted themselves on their self-designed site. In Toronto, Holocaust deniers celebrated their freedom to post anti-Semitic material. The vast catalogue of photos was subsequently edited down to a couple of hundred and published in a book, 24 Hours in Cyberspace.
“The Internet is passing through an awkward adolescence, rebellious and plagued by gawky interfaces, too-slow access times, and more than its share of pointless banality,” wrote Paul Saffo in his preface to the book. But the project was infused with near giddiness over the digital revolution. Saffo added, “Moreover, [cyberspace] is a shape-shifting, borderless medium firmly in the hands of ordinary citizens bent on turning it to extraordinary ends.”
In 1996 the World Wide Web still felt very new. The Internet had existed in at least primitive form since the late 1950s, but it hadn’t been accessible to everyday users until the Web became available in 1993. People were just beginning to understand the new medium’s powers and pitfalls. Schools were struggling to regulate their new Internet connections, public libraries fretted about the future of books, editorialists worried about “online-aholics” and when the Web would “mature,” and people wondered if the Internet would ever much affect politics.
That year the World Wide Web had approximately 40 million users; today the number is in the billions. A lot of the emerging trends the project documented in 1996 now seem almost everlasting. The “Open for Business” section of the book declared the Internet to be an “emerging marketspace.” By 2006 e-tailers reported more than $102.1 billion in sales.
The way news is consumed—and made—has dramatically changed in the 11 years since Smolan’s project. Today 40 percent of Americans say they get at least some of their news online. 24 Hours in Cyberspace called “online diaries” a “genre in the making”; today almost everyone is a blogger, and they not only comment on the news but make it, as when Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, in 1997, and when thesmokinggun.com revealed that James Frey had fabricated much of his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, in 2006. YouTube was undreamt of even three or four years ago, yet it has already showed the world Virginia Sen. George Allen’s “macaca” remark and the comedian Michael Richards’s racist meltdown at a comedy club, among many other things.
What would “24 Hours in Cyberspace” look like if it were done again today? It would be a daunting undertaking, with nearly 30 times more Internet users out there now than in 1996. But it would probably find many of the same stories, with kids in classrooms clustering around a monitor, strippers at work behind their webcams, people browsing personal ads, and doctors searching databases for organ donors. It would also show that the Internet has grown exponentially, become far faster, more sophisticated—and basically ubiquitous.
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