24 hours in cyberspace
24 Hours in Cyberspace (German: 24 hours in cyberspace ) was the first online event of a larger kind, namely worldwide and 24 hours. Organized by the American photographer Rick Smolan, on February 8, 1996, it brought together digitally supplied photos from several thousand amateur and professional photographers on all five continents on a website that showed the lives of people in the then still young world of the Internet and the Personal computers showed.
procedure
The World Wide Web was a few years old in 1996, and there were millions of web pages and tens of millions of people with access to it. To document this closer approach, Rick Smolan developed the concept of 24 Hours in Cyberspace , created the website cyber24.com , and employed a team of employees who viewed the approximately 200,000 photos that came in during the 24 hours - mostly via dial-up connections and modems and put a selection of them online. 150 of the photographers were professionals who were sent on trips especially for the event.
His idea had Smolan from the Media Lab of MIT , which with a "day in the life of cyberspace" (its tenth anniversary in October 1995. A Day in the Life of Cyberspace ) celebrated and to everyone who knew the website of the Institute, invited, with Congratulate emails, pictures and other kinds of digital congratulations. Rick Smolan was one of the many helpers at the event because of his knowledge of photography and the Internet.
24 Hours in Cyberspace cost around three million dollars. The number of hits on the website amounted to an extraordinary four million in the one day alone for the conditions at the time. Today the site no longer exists. Rudiments are stored in the Internet archive. Largely unnoticed by the general public, the media pounced on the topic at the time. There have been numerous reports on television and radio programs and in magazines such as Fortune and Newsweek .
In the same year, Smolan and Jennifer Erwitt brought out a book of the same name, which is now out of print. The future US Vice President Al Gore wrote the foreword. The book contained a CD-ROM with the contents of cyber24.com and, typical for the time, software such as the early Netscape web browser and entry-level packages for online providers such as AOL . In January 1997, the National Museum of American History in Washington DC held a special exhibition on 24 Hours in Cyberspace .
Guiding themes
The aim of the project on February 8, 1996 was not to photograph people in front of computers, but to record how they deal with the digital world, with computers and the Internet. A whole series of photos show people in non-computer environments, for example a woman in an empty bathtub with (as they were back then :) laptop computers on her laps or young men in a bubbling jacuzzi with a laptop in the middle. There are many photos of individuals who others met online, such as autistic and homosexuals .
Topics that only became of general interest much later, such as the surveillance of citizens and barrier-free access to the Internet , also played a role at the event . Numerous varieties of business models on the Internet such as online sex and online trading are also flashing up. A photo shows a man spreading short messages on America Online . The final chapter of the book deals with extreme views that were already being spread over the Internet at the time, such as right-wing ideas. In 1996 the dream of virtual reality played an important role and is reflected in many photos. A photo from Vietnam shows a woman with chickens who use an Internet connection to pay her expensive fax costs (US $ 20 for a fax from Hanoi to New York).
literature
- Rick Smolan, Jennifer Erwitt: 24 Hours in Cyberspace: Photographed on One Day by 150 of the World's Leading Photojournalists (Day in the Life) , QUE / Macmillan 1996, ISBN 978-0-7897-0925-7
Individual evidence
- ↑ Other sources speak of five million dollars.
- ↑ see, for example, the book presentation 24 Hours in Cyberspace ( memento from November 1, 2001 in the Internet Archive ) on the project's website at the time.
- ↑ Carolyn L. Burke was one of the first bloggers before the word "blog" existed. She wrote her internet diary “Carolyn's Diary” from January 1995. Photo: Joe Traver
- ↑ Steve Mann from MIT stands with data glasses, complex transmission technology on his belt and cable release in hand on a pillar in Cambridge (Massachusetts) and films the world around him to broadcast it in real time via his website. Photo: Bill Greene
- ↑ Georgia Griffith, blind from birth, maintained seven discussion forums in CompuServe and worked with a Braille reader connected to the PC. Photo: Beth Keizer
- ↑ The operator of coffee shops in Amsterdam Café transformed into an internet cafe around and found that there was less of hashish was smoked, because customers prefer to sit on the computer and surfed. Photo: Arnaud de Wildenberg.
- ↑ Dan Hurley called his Twitter- like short texts "byte-sized life stories". Photo: Misha Erwitt
- ↑ The Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel was seen as a pioneer of right-wing website operators . He stands with a National Socialist flag in front of a Christ cross. Photo: Arabella Anna Schwarzkopf. Next photo: the Jewish activist Jamie McCarthy, operator of the Nizkor website , covers his face with a laptop computer, as a sign of the threats Nizkor received from the right-wing extremists, and in particular from Zündel.
- ↑ Photo: Lous Raimondo