The year is 1996 or so. You sit down at your desk and turn on your unwieldy desktop computer. After the machine has finally started up, you click on an icon and you wait for the noises. Strange, comical, mechanical noises: digits dialling, then hissing-whining-whooshing, some cartoonish boings, then more hissing – and then, at last, your 56k modem falls silent again and you enter another world. Your body may be sitting awkwardly in a chair, but your mind is now in a whole other realm.
“Perkins, about coming to work as your online avatar.”
Or at least, that’s how it was sold to us. The image of ‘cyberspace’ as a sort of separate dimension that we could enter and exit at will, crossing boundaries between the real and unreal through our computers, was a
