Net naiveté

More sex! I wrote this one when the Internet was only something you read about. And guess Virtual Reality sleaze was the easiest way to get my editor’s attention! This one is a little tamer. A description of my first encounter with the Internet at a college laboratory when ‘Windows’ was still a magical word.

Surf's up

Published in 1997 - or thereabouts

Manoj Naik, research student at Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, is hunched over his terminal at Gateway Sleepy on the Internet. Cyberspace is the part of the world he knows best and today he is giving me a ride across this wondrous frontier.

I am especially curious because Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. (VSNL) has just announced that anybody who has a personal computer, modem, and a telephone can register himself and hook onto the Internet. But what do you do once you get there, and what is the big hurry anyway?
Naik clicks open the windows in his computer and lets me peer at the fascinating parallel world inside. Colored bands float across the screen and he keys in appropriate instructions. "Internet is a virtually inexhaustive source of information" he tells me. "Here you can find something about almost anything on earth."

But that must make Internet a vast jumble of information. How then do you locate whatever you are looking for? " Very few people are ever sure of the locations. So we have Web Browsers - friendly software like Netscape and Mosaic - which are directories to the Internet" explains Naik. "They are navigational charts which take you wherever you want to go."

Right now we are trying to locate information on Dire Straits, the rock band. The mouse in Naik's hand is a magic wand as it traipses across the screen to reveal layers of information. Our catchword is Dire Straits and soon enough a picture of the familiar steel guitar begins to form on the screen.

Even with the high technology it has not been particularly easy. The Indian Internet link functions on a very narrow bandwidth, which limits the amount of information, it can carry. The way I figure it, it is rather like transporting petroleum in tubes instead of pipelines. Information filters through painfully slowly, taking minutes rather than seconds. Pictures come on even more leisurely than the text and Mark Knopfler's guitar forms in little dabs on the screen.

Pretty soon however we have hiccups with the telephone line. Despite its technological pretensions Internet is a no go if old-fashioned telephone lines do not work. Our connections are finally 'alive' after consuming quite a bit of our patience. Naik still does not trust his luck entirely and repeatedly opens the magic window on the screens to confirm that the telephone connections have not been delinked.

When we are finally ready to read, the information available is a fan's dream. Critical articles, interviews, discography, biographical details; news of forthcoming plans, etc, are all there and what is more this information is constantly updated. On Internet nothing is ever behind the times.

All the information is not merely a blink on the screen. Unlike big screen movies these can be preserved forever and for no cost; finally books for free! And what is more even picture can be stored.

So far the information we have been looking for has spiraled one way towards us." The beauty of the Internet line in the enter -activity," says Naik, " If you are looking for a conversation there are a host of discussion groups that you can latch on to and discuss anything under the sun."
This is where the worries come in. Internet is likely to provide access to loads of information, which is likely to be not only useless but also tasteless. A lot of folks are likely to spend most of their time downloading cyber-porn or cyber-babble.

Freedom, however used, is a very serious issue on Internet and computer aficionados who have developed the network without any active assistance from Governments are extremely touchy when anything regulatory infringes upon their domain. B.N. Jain, Professor at the Computer Science Department, IIT, say Internet will always stay ahead of Governments. “To describe cyberspace as uncontrolled or chaotic is to miss the point entirely, " he points out " It is far more fruitful to describe it as distributed control. We are now moving beyond the stage where nodal agencies had enormous clout. The goods are distributed far more equitably in cyberspace. Let's see what we can make out of it".

Some uses, of course, suggest themselves automatically. Entertainment is likely to be redefined and the commercial prospects enjoined by the unprecedented information dissemination are immense. People sitting at home will now have fiber-optic nerves doing everything for them. They need never go out. I could have written this article sitting are home, talking to my sources on the computer and then just unloaded the file in my office computer. Would I be tempted to do just that in the very near future?

Jain is not too sure. "Technology does not necessarily diminish human contact. Internet will make work more efficient but you would still need to meet people. I would not have granted this interview without seeing you. You may make a million faceless friends on the computer but you will still want to hold someone's hands."

Sex and other adventures in cyberspace

Originally published in The Pioneer - circa 1993-4.

In today's world, sex and technology make generally un-wholesome bedfellows. If you're the kinky sort, you can make love to, or with machines; if you staid enough to restrict your urges to your fellow species, you can make do with the disembodied services of telephone sex or stare at pre-programmed images on movie or video screens. Understandably, most of us feel a shade disinclined to go hi-tech and sex is generally accomplished in close confines in a manner easily recognizable to our earliest ancestors, perhaps even to animals.

Hang on though, the portents appear brighter. MTV addicts may have seen a trailer of the future in the Aerosmith video Amazing and the naughty sizzler makes ‘teledildonics’ or long-distance inter-personal sex appear simplicity itself. The trick will perhaps be in dressing for the occasion: you will need an intimate, snug and transparent bodysuit meshed with tiny tactile detectors coupled to vibrators of varying degrees of hardness that will be able to transmit a realistic sense of ‘touch’ and ‘feel’. You will then need to top yourself with an HMD (head-mounted display), don sensor-webbed gloves and you'll be ready to copulate in cyberspace. Dial your partner's telephone number, enter the computer password and you'll soon be immersed in VR (virtual reality), a life-like but totally artificial representation of your bodies in cyberspace where you can whisper in her ear or bite it or do anything else and those detectors in your bodysuit will be triggered at just the right frequency and sequence to convey just the right scratch and squeeze you prefer.

‘Smart skin’ aided intercontinental sex will be as easy as that in a world encompassing relatives of Aldous Huxley's ‘feelies’. But wait, how long before we can fast-forward into the age of these not-so-innocuous telephone connections and portable telediddlers? Well, perhaps the middle-aged and the elderly will have to resign themselves to making the best of available technologies, but the young can take heart. Computational load capacities will doubtlessly expand in the future and the promise of fiber-optic networks webbing the earth should occlude any hitches concerning the high bandwidth that tactile telepresence requires. The spoilsports at the moment are the sense receptors that will require myriad computer calculations to duplicate the minutest nuances and emotions of the human body. Still, the fantasy continues to inch towards verity.

Before that, however, a look backwards and a definition. Sci-fi writer Willian Gibson who coined the term cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer described it thus: ‘Cyberspace -- a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation by children being taught mathematical concepts...a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system’. It means a whole new artificial world that exists only in our collective consciousness and within our computers. A communications revolution.

Its deliciously homebrewed story connects with the PC revolution and networking, a phenomena that we indubitably owe to the hordes of amateur computer ‘hackers’ who diligently, if sometimes mischievously, found ways of breaking into other people's computers, thus creating the earlier instances of cyberspace. As with all pioneers, the activities of these ‘hackers’ (whose fame was initially spread by the movie War Games) were not viewed very kindly by the established authorities who found their computer systems infested with unauthorized accessors and the FBI believing them to be an advanced crime ring, often swooped on the ‘hackers’, seizing every bit of electronic equipment they could lay their hands on.

However, with time and demonstrations of manifold utility in everything from telecommunications to toys (indeed, video games experts and Hollywood deserve special place in the story), cyberspace has gradually ceased to be the derelict frontier and its whiz-kid cowboys now strut their stuff in some of the most gilt-edged laboratories in the world.

Virtual reality adds a dimensional doorway to cyberspace. In this three-dimensional world, the user does not merely peer at a fixed perspective through a screen, as in the two-dimensional world of ‘simulators’ used to train pilots, but can instead, immerse himself in the artificial world within the screen and use a gesture to remold it. If this sounds abstruse, imagine that you're a gifted architect adept at envisioning complex three-dimensional structures which you cannot possibly illustrate for your clients except via simulacrums like models or diagrams. Factors like seismic stress or acoustics beat even your skilled mental techniques and your clients often remain vague till much work has been done on the actual building. Here virtual reality offers the possibility of creating ‘architectural walkways’, meaning that you can fit the entire building into a computer screen, and then entering it observe it from any angle, or better still, enter any of the rooms, open windows, rearrange the furniture and feel even intangibles like the sunlight on your body. If you don't like anything, you can change it right there.

Sounds convenient, but does it convince? Science writer Howard Rheingold has surveyed the terrain and he reports some amazing inventions from artificial reality labs across the world. At NASA he commandeered repair boats in ‘virtual outer space’; in Japan he had an eerie out-of-body sensation watching himself through the eyes of a telerobot; at Cambridge, Massachusetts he ran his fingertips over ‘virtual sand paper’ by means of a texture-sensing joy- stick and watched scientists create animated creatures that will live in tomorrow's semi-sentient virtual worlds; and in arty France he fulfilled the ultimate ambition of every armchair musician -- he moved his hands in empty space as if playing ‘air violin’ and presto, the glove covering his hand transmitted the actual sensation of drawing a bow against a taut violin string.

And thus the line towards ‘teledildonics’ continues to be drawn: artificial intelligence no longer threatens to make humans redundant but instead appears to augur human intelligence amplification. We may indeed be on the brink of a unique historical opportunity as the high bandwidth networks of the 1990s and beyond link billions of homes and unprecedented cyberspace opens up for colonization. Detractors will have qualms about ‘electronic LSD’ -- potentially addictive 'sensory’ experiences that may make reality pale in comparison -- and more seriously about the uncontrolled, chaotic nature of cyberspace that even today includes inter-cultural, multinational networks ranging in size from amateur bulletin board systems in high-school students' bedrooms to the mother of them all, the Internet.

But we need to view retrospectively how every change in technology, from the earliest civilizations to our very own steam engines to TV and even our earlier generation computers, has enriched our lives and in the process expanded far beyond the expectations of their inventors. Cyber- space should turn out to be a medium of great social power. Infrastructure and even belief systems are likely to cluster around it. As a brand new communications network reaches its apogee, we need to perhaps remind ourselves of McLuhan's prophesy of an altered ratio between senses and brance ourselves accordingly. Alternatively fall prey to making love in cyberspace and never ever being able to come of it.