A Naturalist in CyberSpace

A day later Egypt’s Internet service is back up to 60 percent capacity. Internet traffic has been shifted from the damaged Mediteranean cables to alternative service providers using cables in the Indian Ocean.

My vision of cyberspace has taken a hit. I hadn’t considered that cables are what give us access to cyberspace, but an article in this morning’s paper reported that Egypt suffered a massive Internet outage after three cables off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily were cut the morning of December 19, 2008. The cause of the cut was not immediately known, but throughout Egypt the Internet was almost completely down or working sporadically.

In reading through old Time magazines, I chanced upon this quotation in a December 1, 2008 essay by Michael Kinsley: “The great thing about blogs, in my view, is that they share the voioce of e-mail. It’s a genuinely new literary form, which, at best, combines the immediacy of talking with the reflectiveness of writing.” Interesting. I’m glad blogs are getting some positive press.

I spent most of the day posting all of the accumulated stuff on my kitchen table to my Factoids blog — kind of a dumb thing for a naturalist to be doing, but it rained all morning and snowed all afternoon, and for some reason working on this particular blog seemed like a good way to make use of the time. Factoids is the only one of my blogs that grows of its own accord. My job seems to be to keep up with it. Who knows where it’s taking me, but it leads me and I follow.

I decided to create a section of my Web site that would offer an annotated list of the Web projects I’ve been working on so far, including my most active blogs. I called it My Web Projects. It took me most of the day to get it together, but the effort helped me clarify where I’ve been and where I seem to be going.

Well, I took my walk and decided to keep ALL my blogs. So what if some of them are static and some are totally undeveloped? They all still appeal to me as possibilities, so I’ll keep them for a while longer — which brings me to this blog, which is in a class by itself. This one is attached to my official Web site, which is my official presence on the Web. It already has the first listing on the first page of Google for Gale Lawrence so this blog stands a better chance of being read than all the others put together. So what will I say? I don’t know yet, but I have eight years of exploring cyberspace behind me and the whole future of what I might learn about cyberspace ahead of me, so I guess I’ll just let this blog be the record of my experiences — with lots of links to my other cyber projects.

Because I have other blogs than this one, I decided I should report on them. So I just spent the whole afternoon counting up and reviewing all my other blogs. It turns out that as of December 8, 2008, I have 11 Blogger blogs, 25 WordPress blogs, and now this new Web site blog for a grand total of 37! I need to take a long walk and think about things before I decide what I’m going to say or do about them….

It occurred to me that I don’t even know what cyberspace is, what the word means, and whether my fantasy of it is all wrong. So I looked up cyberspace in Webster’s 11th, which says, “n (1982): the online world of computer networks and esp. the Internet,” which motivated me to look up Internet, for which the dictionary says, “n (1985): an electronic communications network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities around the world,” which in turn motivated me to look up the World Wide Web for which the dictionary says, “n (1990): a part of the Internet accessed through a graphical user interface and containing documents often connected by hyperlinks — called also Web.” So now I’m wondering what Webster’s 11th has to say about blogs. For blog it says, “n [short for Weblog] (1999): a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer; also: the contents of such a site — blogger n — blogging n.” And the next listing was for blogosphere, “n (2002)” all of the blogs on the Internet as a collective whole.” It’s interesting that the order in which I looked up the words I was curious about is also the chronological order in which they entered our vocabulary. Furthermore, the order proceeds from biggest to smallest (I think), which makes my fantasy of cyberspace seem right on.  Finally, I learned that I started blogging the year after the word entered the language, which makes me feel a bit like a brave pioneer ….

One other piece of information surfaced when I looked up cyberspace in my AP Stylebook: “Cyberspace is a term popularized by William Gibson in the novel “Neuromancer” to refer to the digital world of computer networks.”

Over breakfast with a writer friend this morning, I got to wondering out loud if perhaps cyberspace is more permanent and enduring than books? When I started trying to be a writer, I believed that books were the most eternal places I could put my words. But now it’s occurring to me that the books I worked so hard to write will probably drift out of print and linger around only in the kinds of libraries that never clean out their stacks and dusty old used-book stores. So maybe cyberspace is actually a more permanent place to put what I write? Who knows? It’s there, it’s free, anyone can chance to read what I chance to write, and given its vastness, I can’t imagine anyone ever deciding to clean it up and delete old texts. So whatever I write in my blogs might just last forever. In light of my miserable experiences with the publishers I worked with, writing for whatever readers I happen to connect with in cyberspace seems worth the effort. Now all I have to worry about is content….

Cyberspace, as I imagine it, is so vast, voluminous, continuous, and eternal that once I discovered it (early in the year 2000, when I bought my first computer), I have been sucked deeper and deeper into it by something that some days feels like a cybervortex. Having discovered the blogosphere while I was still exploring my new computer and its potential, one thing has led to another until by now I’ve created so many blogs I can’t keep track of them all. I use them as repositories and/or searchable archives of the things I’m thinking about, writing about, wanting to remember, and, most importantly, wanting not to forget. Another blog seems crazy, but I’ve just taken ownership of my new Joomla-based Web site, which I will be managing myself — yet another cyber-adventure — and I got to thinking it needs a blog of its own to help me keep track of where I’ve been and where I’m going. So on December 2, 2008, I launched A NATURALIST IN CYBERSPACE as a record of my journey — past, present, and future. I will backdate posts as necessary so I will have a record of my WHOLE journey and I will do my best to keep up with my progress if I make any. Certainly I have the sales receipt for that first computer somewhere ….