To celebrate our 500th post, we Anti-Roomers share how
the internet has changed our lives for the better – and the worse. We’d
love to hear your early internet stories, life-changing online
experiences and whether you love or loathe the interweb…
Anna Carey
The first time I went online was in 1994. I had read in the
NME
that Courtney Love had been rambling wildly but entertainingly on
something called a newsgroup, which as far as my innocent little arts
student brain could gather was a way of writing stuff on a computer that
could be read by lots of people on different computers all over the
world. I knew about e-mail, though I didn’t have an account – at the
time, only computer science and maths students at Trinity, where I was
in first year, automatically had college e-mail accounts, and I was
doing German and History of Art. But this public discussion thing was
new to me. So I nagged one of my best friends, who happened to be
studying computer science, to show me how to read Courtney’s ravings on a
Sun computer in the Hamilton science building. I was unimpressed by
Courtney, but mildly intrigued by the whole internet thing – not that I
could do much about my interest down in my Arts Block home.
When I started my third year of college in October 1995, arts
students finally got Eudora e-mail accounts (though there wasn’t enough
server space to accommodate us, so we had to save our mails onto
individual floppy discs), and I haven’t looked back since. By 1996, I
had discovered the possibilities of hugely entertaining webzines (I miss
you,
Blair); by
1998, I was engaging in discussions on Hissyfit.com with people who, as I
discovered when I met up with some of them while visiting the US a year
later, were just as they seemed online: smart, funny and good company.
Soon after that I became involved in the forums at a women-centric
literature site called Chicklit.com (named before the term took off as a
description of popular fiction). Through the Chicklit forums, I was
introduced to dozens of authors who have since become my firm favourites
and, more importantly, many people who have since become dear and close
real-life friends. When I joined Livejournal back in 2002, many of my
friends there were from Chicklit, and these days loads of us are on
Twitter. We’ve all been talking on the internet, and sometimes meeting
in real life, for more than a decade, and my life is definitely better
for it.
Since I first read Courtney’s ravings in the Hamilton, the internet
has changed my life in many ways. It’s allowed me to keep in touch
easily with friends who have moved away. It’s allowed me to make
genuine, real friendships with people from Canada to Edinburgh to
Dublin, people who were once just words on a screen. In Twitter and
indeed the Anti-Room, it’s given me the equivalent of an office full of
smart, funny, thought-provoking people, some of whom have also become
real-life friends, while I work alone at home. It’s made my job so much
easier – when I started my first job at the
Sunday Tribune
back in 1998, there was only one computer in the entire building with
internet access, and the amount of information available online was
much, much smaller. It’s educated and entertained me. It’s given me
countless books and music that I would never have had access to before –
I got my first credit card purely to buy American stuff from Amazon,
back in 1999. It’s enraged me and upset me – there ain’t no drama like
internet drama, and over the years I’ve typed a few comments and posts
with hands that were almost shaking with rage. It’s made me temporarily
lose my faith in humanity – just a few minutes looking at the comments
over at
Comment is Free
robs me of the will to live. It’s distracted me not just from work –
entire evenings at home, evenings I should have spent hanging out with
my husband or reading a book or playing the piano or working on some
art, have been sucked into the maw of Twitter and Google Reader. It’s
tapped into my worst qualities – my innate desire for distraction and
novelty, my procrastination, my need to have the last word. And it’s put
pointless pressure on me – while I do love my iPhone, sometimes I
genuinely hate the expectation that we should all be constantly
contactable and online at all times.
But it’s also entertained me, made me laugh, given me good friends,
and shown me how incredibly nice and kind people can be. And for that, I
can only be grateful.
Sinéad Gleeson
Sometime
in early 1996, I remember getting up very early one morning to queue in
UCD for an email account. Not an internet one – the two were distinctly
separate – but one solely for email, with no other web access. The idea
now seems positively antediluvian. The only reason I wanted said
account, was because my brother had just moved to Australia. Email was a
far more affordable way of talking about records and gigs than 3am
phonecalls when I’d wandered home from a club. The clunky,
minutes-to-load account was life-changing, and a bazillion gigabytes
away from today’s smart phones with their Sci-fi apps. My consumption of
online life has intrinsically increased. It’s invaluable for my job,
for music, for contact with distant friends, for rewatching TV shows,
laughing at viral nonsense… But it’s also the biggest time sponge I
know, and the reason why I have umpteen unfinished short stories sitting
on my laptop. It’s a leveller and a curse; indispensable and completely
disposable. You learn to live with the duality of something that is
both an enormous help and a hindrance. I’ve killed my Facebook account
four times, but Twitter is the most instantaneous news ticker I know.
I’ve made lots of friends, from my early days as Editor of an
online magazine (Sigla) to Arts & Culture blogging and now among the
wonderful women of the Anti Room. The key is balance. To embrace it,
but to also plug out more and remember that when you’re not online –
like those Saturday nights in your early 20s when you were broke and had
to stay in – that you’re not missing very much anyway.
Sarah Franklin
I thought this topic was an utter no-brainer for me. Gorgeous Twitter,
which some days feels like my own personal version of Sliding Doors.
Where else can I chat to people I probably sat next to in college French
lectures, people I unknowingly drank alongside in Soho dive bars,
people like, well, the ladies of the Anti Room, who I should have known
years ago? All at once? Without even leaving my desk? (although, as
Keith Ridgeway put it so mesmerically,
beware the false sense of company). Yep; Twitter’s changed my life more than any other section of the internet, I thought.
But then I thought back a bit, to the prehistoric times of 2005.
Twitter was but a gleam in Jack Dorsey’s eye and both Skype and my elder
son had both entered their infancy. We were living in Seattle, a good
place for knowing about emergent technologies and a TERRIBLE place to be
if you want to show your newborn child to your extended family, and
they’re all 5,000 miles away. Skype honestly changed my life at that
point. Post-natal blues were so much easier to handle with the baby and
the laptop both wedged on my lap, my son’s head given a ReadyBrek glow
from the screen as he slept and my grandmother gazed at him, rapt.
It’s a funny old thing, the internet. Sure, it means we can shop
without leaving our sofa, that we’re never more than a mouse click away
from knowing who wrote the song lyrics you can’t stop trilling, but
that’s not really the power of it. Seeing people, real people, people
you love, from thousands of miles away; watching that family bond come
down the interpipes; that’s amazing.
Lisa McInerney
I can’t really say the internet has changed my life. It’s
made my
life; there wasn’t a time, from my teens on, when there wasn’t an
internet to teach, and entertain, and distress, and provoke me. I
embraced an online life from the beginning – chat rooms, message boards,
amateur web design … blogging. Most obviously blogging. The fact that
we’re living in The Information Age is something I find endlessly
fascinating, and I think it’s shaping the world we live so radically
it’s practically … biblical. No, honestly. I waffle on about this a
lot. The Book of Genesis, in which ignorance was equated with beauty and
innocence, to the Information Age, in which there are absolutely no
limits to personal pursuit of knowledge; we’ve come 360 and that’s
thrilling and kind of disconcerting, if you’re a superstitious type. Who
knows what effect all this info will have on us? But that’s a subject
for another day, possibly one spent in a cafe in Amsterdam. Personally,
the internet has been good to me. It allowed me a platform to write,
an instant audience to make me improve, the knowledge that shaped me as
an adult. And gosh, have I met some really amazing people. Some of my
closest friends were originally “internet people”. I can’t imagine my
life without them. And as for those who moan about the “evils” of
Facebook – learn to streamline your experience, read up on the privacy
options, and make the bloody thing work for you. I have whole legions of
far-away relatives whose faces I’d have forgotten if we didn’t have
Facebook to weld us together. Play me off, keyboard cat!
Rosita Boland
The A-Z of my internet life…
@ the new 27th letter of the alphabet. Antiroom blog – a must-read, everyone!
Bewildered to know how I would live without the internet now.
Couldn’t live without the internet now – did I mention that?
Dial up – took forever and sounded like a freight train.
E-mail - it changed everything about the way I communicated with people.
Floppy disk – never really understood them. Facebook – never did that.
Galway – where I went to my first ever internet café, in Cornmarket Lane, about 15 years ago.
Help! – Sound I emitted many a time when I thought I’d broken the internet.
Information superhighway – remember that?
Journalism – I hope it never dies, no matter what the future of digital media holds.
Kansas – what I would rename the internet.
Letters – sadly, I no longer write them, although I used to write six a week for years.
Macs – been through two laptops so far.
Netbook – my latest on-the-hoof bit of gear.
Online. Online. Online – are we ever offline these days?
Paywall – we put them up at the Irish Times, we took them down; as busy as the construction industry in Ireland this last decade.
Questions – are there any the internet considers it cannot answer?
Real Player – more new language I now take for granted.
Skype – talking and waving to my faraway friends for free.
Tibet – the very first word I ever keyed into a search engine.
Twitter - where I’ve found so many new friends.
Unknown – there are always so many new places the internet takes me.
Virtual – a dazzling experience the internet allows; it
has let me see video clips from literally all over the world, and
almost feel like I’m there.
Web – a word I’ve already discarded.
X – internet, I heart you!
YouTube – my favourite clip ever is the mad music video, Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off.
Z – often difficult to get any when engrossed with The Twitter or any of the many joys of the internet.
Jude Leavy
Picture the scene; the romantic incomer – beguiling, charming and
undeniably fascinating, with a metaphorical sweep of opera cape, a
suggestive bit of eyebrow play and a mutter of sweet sentiments it
snares me into its loving embrace where I swoon…
I am a fan of the internet.
Years ago it successfully courted and seduced me implanting itself
into almost every aspect of my life. Work, leisure time, friendships, I
saw the world with the tickets I’d booked online, attended plays and
enjoyed concerts through it, reconnected with old acquaintances and kept
in touch with new ones.
I made friends through the internet, true friendships sometimes with
people from other ends of the globe; some I went on to meet up face to
face, others I know I never will. It even played a role in introducing
me to my fiancé (which I wrote about
here) thereby changing my life in the biggest way possible.
I also have to it to thank for being here, writing with this amazing
group of extraordinary women; the people I wished I’d known when I was
becoming the adult I am.
Of late I’ve found my beloved internet to be a demanding lover, I’ve
allowed it to muscle in other potential love interests in its quest to
dominate. So have been forced to be strong and cut back on the hours we
spend together, to recover more of my off-line life. I had expected it
to cause me many a pang on leaving it, but strangely this hasn’t really
been the case. Perhaps my red hot love is not the real passion of my
life, but just a passing fancy?
I do hope not.
Eleanor Fitzsimons
Despite living a good portion of my life in the real rather than the
virtual world I simply can’t imagine life offline at this stage. I
remember the day we first connected, way back in 1996. Sneering in the
face of a potentially skyrocketing phone bill the husband & I hooked
up a laptop to our phone socket via a labyrinthine tangle of trailing
wires that snaked across the living room and caused us to temporarily
lose telephone contact with the outside world. I looked on sceptically
as he typed in the long numerical string that he assured me was our IP
address, no user-friendly front-end back in the day. I can’t remember
what we looked up, something utterly innocuous I’d imagine, but I was
hooked.
Several years later, while living in London, I was booking tickets to
must-see shows and iconic sporting events, not to mention flights and
train journeys all over a world that had become my oyster. I had serious
RPS and my credit card was on fire. Before I knew it (and yes I am
cringing as I type) I had signed up for daily internet updates on my
first pregnancy.
Nowadays I simply can’t imagine life without the internet. You might
as well ask me to live in a cave and forage for bush tucker. I use it
for work and for connecting with friends, old and new. I tweet and blog
and file copy and mess about and still book holidays and shows and
sporting events. I’ve shaken off the shackles of the desktop and shed
the weight of the laptop by getting an iPhone. Next step is undoubtedly
an implant in my brain. There must be a website offering that…
Jennie Ridyard
Hail,
hail the new religion, for is that not what the Holy Trinity of
Internet, Facebook and Twitter are? Lo, on Sunday mornings we gather in
the light of a screen, or sit alone in silent contemplation, picking out
like a mantra our online prayer, “OMG”. We bow before the Gospel
according to Google and Wikipedia, and confess everything to the
all-knowing, all-embracing Status Update. Then we mutter endless Hail
Mary Byrnes – is she really singing the next Bond theme tune? Some
merely dip a toe in, checking church times online and googling their own
names. Others are found in the pews morning, noon and night, tweeting
each passing thought, blogging their sermons, and singing the praises of
lolcats and failblog, while damning 13-year-old Rebecca Black to hell.
Like a religion, the plugged-in world offers an answer to everything
and a friend to everyone. You can be reborn on Avatar, you can embrace
kibbutzim on Farmville. Equally, you can cure diseases on WebMD, make
your offerings via Paypal, and wage war on the sinners, the Muslims, the
Bible-thumpers, the atheists, the smokers, the non-smokers, the obese,
the anorexic, the ugly, the beautiful, and Justin Bieber. Oh, and you
can wage actual war in Libya too, wielding the sword of eternal truth
that is Twitter. Indeed, through the miracle of YouTube the scales fall
from our eyes as we bear witness to modern miracles like Monkey Rapes
Frog and Fire Fart Goes Wrong.
Yea, I tell thee, this is the way, the truth, and the light. It’s
also how to lose your way, spread untruths and spend days alone in the
dark.
Nuala Ní Chonchúir
Internet -The good: new friends (real & virtual);
reconnecting with old friends; access to a world of information; being
able to send things (manuscripts, photos) without the palaver of Post
Office visits with kids in tow; online banking; online shopping (very
important when you live in the sticks); literary blogs; freely available
music; new audience for my books; cheap PR for cash-poor writers; speed
of access to Important People in publishing etc.
Internet -The bad: e-mail pile-up; obsessing about
being able to be online and/or feeling bereft if the internet connection
is down; stalkers; reconnecting with old friends; people picking fights
with you over innocuous/innocent statements; people being nasty in
general; going online when drunk and being over-chatty; people knowing
far too much about your life; time-wasting; isolation; Facebook
competitiveness and boasting.
Antonia Hart
In about 1988, in the school computer room, in
order to draw a green box on the black screen we had to type the
following commands in LOGO:
TO DRAW
CLEARSCREEN
SHOW TURTLE
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 50
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 50
HIDE TURTLE
It was more fun than double R.E. but not much. I’m not a
techno-refusenik. My credentials: at college I rescued a ditched black
and white screened Apple Mac Classic (the nicest computer in the world,
ever) from a skip outside the Physics Building and fooled around with
HyperCard, running off a floppy disk. I met the World Wide Web proper in
about 1996, and it seemed, as a series of pages linked to and fro by
embedded directions, to be based on Hypercard. I discovered Telnet and
FTP and wrote stories for the Sunday Business Post using Borland Sprint,
an MS DOS based word processor. I did an MSc in Multimedia Systems at
Trinity in 1997, the first year it ran, and it felt then as if we were
part of the breaking news of the internet. I worked in web design, and
online advertising. Got that? I practically invented the internet.
Of course it’s changed my life. Without it I wouldn’t be able to
work from home, so would either have no children or no job. I wouldn’t
be contemplating a summer house exchange. I wouldn’t be writing this
post. My music would have ground to a halt at about fifty CDs. It’s
changed my life for the better, but I want less of it, not more. I’ve
read about six emails since I started typing this post. Getting to a
point of concentration is like climbing down steps into a well, deeper
and deeper until you can sense the water. You finally get a toe in.
You’re aiming for submersion. With the internet, and the ways of working
it makes possible, I find myself constantly climbing up again, down,
up, down, up, and never reaching the water. Have I exhausted my metaphor
yet? I don’t like the way it fractures my thinking, the shortness of
its texts, the virtue it makes of hopping about. I don’t tweet, because I
am guarding my time and I cannot afford to donate any more chunks of it
to online conversations, no matter how relevant or witty they are. I
think Facebook – despite its usefulness as a place to promote events and
small businesses – is just vacuous, endless pages of self-promotion and
self-portraits and all that information being sold to the highest
advertising bidder.
I need time to do things for longer, to do them more slowly, to
think about them in greater depth. I want more reflection time, more
reaction time, more satisfying contemplation. I want to read slowly and
with care, I want to take days to think about what I’ve read and what I
think about it. I want to be in the world, not experiencing it through
an online prism.
I also want an iPad 2.
June Caldwell
I can’t remember my first email in the same way I can’t remember my
first roast potato, but I do recall getting addicted to random chatrooms
very early on. Rubbish chatyack where you simply logged on and saw
streams of absurd irrational messages dropping in real-time like
plunging neon, before wasting eight hours of my working life, missing
deadlines. Immediacy and anonymity were overwhelming features of my
unspecified shadowy self on de web. Of course this would get me into
trouble very early on. In the mid 1990s I mistakenly sent an email to my
boss instead of the man I was having a fling with in the office, to
disastrous consequences (especially as I was, er, mentioning what a
prick the boss was at the time).
It was also the year I sat through a rather trite PgDip in
Journalism, where I realised how easy it was to sift through cyber
offscourings for feature ideas to sell. A tiny ancillary fact about an
increase in unmarried fathers phoning Parentline about child access
problems, turned into my first published article: ‘Clowning Around With
Fatherhood’, published in the Big Issues in 1997. An article I wrote on
narcolepsy a month later was picked up by a health supplement in the New
York Times. I could barely fathom how any of this ‘global village’
stuff could happen! The ‘world wide web’ very quickly became a de
rigueur necessity of both my working day and my off-duty life.
Flurry
and melodrama surrounding this newfound instant access to info still
manages to fool me, and I often fail to see the danger in mouthing off
without reserve. A few weeks ago a 14-year-old girl hacked into my
partner’s Facebook account, printing off all our private messages [some
of which were unsuitably sexual, others which were raw and noxious
drunken arguments dating back to a horrendous few years in Belfast) and
is now claiming to be Pandora’s box disturbed by what she read. Her
mother had ‘encouraged’ her to excavate this material, without any care
in the world for how it might damage her. This is the kind of horrific
payoff that seems tout de suite worth it in the midst of relationship
breakup. The experience has made me feel sad and sick to the core.
Likewise, the existence of trolls (even on this blog) upsets me
immensely when they dig in claws for little or no reason. Or the
flagrant paedo who keeps looking me up on Linkedin and any other website
I’m registered to/with due to his lack of life, or the knowledge that I
wrote things online very early on that I had no idea would linger
everlastingly (rubbish poems, half-finished stories, crap ideas).
However, it’s not all bedlam and mobocracy, I have met some
incredible new friends (antiroom peeps more recently), sourced
much-needed work, shared opinions through Facebook updates, splashed
about different demeanours and ‘frames of mind’ [especially on Twitter]
I’d never get a chance to in the humdrum of ordinary daily life. A piece
I wrote on depression won ‘Best Blog Post’ at the recent
Irish Blog Awards
– only a few short months into my newfound blogging life – and a poem I
wrote was picked up and published by a UK magazine. As a writer, it’s
becoming increasingly clear how vital an online presence is, not just
for freedom of expression or the ability to rant, but to stay in touch
with people who might want to hear what you have to say.
Digital stratosphere is also great for following other writers in the
same genre I’m interested in. As a shy gobshite all my life, this type
of connectedness is nothing short of love. Then there was the time I was
being bullied by a paramilitary landlord in Carrickfergus and having
got so totally bored with his daily intrusions, I lost my mind and
contacted a local sex addict who took me to an abandoned salt mine where
he did some ‘stuff’ that took my mind right off my ills for more than a
day. But who wants to hear a glut of unsavoury details of how my cyber
life led me astray when there’s so much goodwill and kindheartedness to
mull over instead?
Claire Hennessy
I grew up with the internet, so I’ve never known what it’s like to be a
grown-up without it. But a lot of the complaints I hear people make –
the obligations to present a public persona, to update their various
social media outlets, the busyness of it all – just sound to me like the
sort of things adulthood seemed to be about. Being capable of making
one’s own choices, but still having obligations and commitments, whether
it was attending some work event or chatting to someone at the
supermarket. Many of these things often sounded suspiciously close to
fun, and if they were really that dreadful then why didn’t grown-ups
just, well, not do them?
That little child-voice in my head that wonders why grown-ups talk about the things they ‘have’ to do when they don’t
really
have to speaks up a lot when I think about the internet and how
time-consuming it can be, how we can feel under pressure to respond
immediately to emails or represent ourselves in an interesting way on
Twitter or whatever it might be. It’s the same voice that reminds me
that despite all the complaining we can do, the truth is that for most
of us, the internet, like growing-up, is infinitely better than the
alternative.
Catherine Crichton
My contribution is all about Twitter. So, what have I got out of it?
- A bottle of wine from @grapesofsloth, just for posting him a useful link
- Two free theatre tickets from @darraghdoyle for entering a competition
- A copy of Mary Poppins from @patomahony1, which I passed on in turn to @snastablasta
But those are just the added extras. Twitter is a source of news,
information, fun, great conversations and recommendations for films,
books, restaurants and music. It’s all out there if you follow the right
people. TV becomes communal; many programmes just aren’t the same
without a simultaneous Twitter stream of comments and observations.
I often work from home, and while Twitter can be a terrible
distraction, it also helps to make tedious work bearable and lessens the
feelings of isolation. During a recent hospital stay I was really
touched by all the good wishes I received from my Twitter friends. And,
sad though this may sound, I do regard some of my Twitter contacts as
friends. I have met a few of them in the real world, and hope to meet
more.
As @nickmcgivney wrote in this
recent blog post,
Twitter can help people to virtually meet their heroes. I have had a
tragic middle-aged crush on actor David Morrissey (@davemorrissey64)
since once briefly meeting him. Lo and behold, he joined Twitter and
posts interesting tweets and an excellent daily music track of the day.
Not only that, but he also engages with his followers including,
occasionally and thrillingly, me. I have also had a few exchanges with
the highly amusing @hughbon. Oh yes Downton Abbey fans, only Lord
Grantham himself!
But the best thing about Twitter is that it inspired me to move
beyond 140 characters and to start writing, on a (recently neglected)
blog of my own, and here at the Anti Room. Nothing beats the feeling of
someone commenting that they enjoyed something I have written. So I want
to raise a glass to Sinead, Anna and all the other Anti Room women.
Here’s to the next 500 posts.
Amanda Brown
Answering people’s social media problems in the
Irish Times for the past year has taught me a thing or two.
Stuff I knew already: Irish people are intensely private, mostly
because if it gets out their grandmother will know within five seconds,
problems on the Internet feel as all-encompassing as problems off the
Internet – they are real problems – and everyone’s compartmentalised
social spheres are becoming melded together.
Things that have impressed on me include; just how intensely personal
problems on the Internet are, how little most people who use it know
about how to protect themselves on it, how unwilling most people are to
be rude on the Internet – except the copious amounts of people who
become incredibly rude when they are on the Internet.
The ramifications of the move of large parts of our social lives online are profound and currently little known.
What we do know is society has always had technology and technology
has always been a part of society. There are negative books about the
Internet being spat out as if the printed word were going out of fashion
(snark), the most recent being a tome called
Alone Together by
Sherry Turkle. These types of books claim the revolution of social
media on the Internet is making us socially poorer by creating an
illusion of being surrounded by friends when the essential elements of
real friendship (regular real world meetings, face to face communication
etc) are not there.
There are other, more positive books, notably
The Cognitive Surplas
by Clay Shirky, which recognises the enormous power of good that has
occurred from millions of people democratically connecting in order to
entertain, inform and even encourage each other to give charitably and
improve the real world.
The arguments against the Internet continue to rumble on ploughing
the exact same ground as all those spouted against television.
My bottom line, having dealt primarily for the last year with
people’s problems online, is that the Internet and more specifically
Social Media, widens our lives out in a mostly positive way by making
connection and meaningful, as well as meaningless, communication
possible at the touch of a fingertip
As Adam Gopnik wrote in his superb New Yorker article on the subject, “Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them.”
Social media delivers far more people’s thoughts far more effectively than any previous media revolution.
That will take us where we decide to take ourselves.
Aoife Barry
My first forays onto the internet took place when I was in secondary
school. I’d go online with a friend, using her creaky dial-up
connection. We’d sit chomping on Pringles while patiently waiting for
the beep-beep-brriing-buzz noises to signal that we were on our way to
the super cyber highway. Though the internet seemed a huge and somewhat
unfathomable beast, with an infinite amount of information at my
fingertips, I always ended up doing exact the same thing – going to Alta
Vista and searching for very basic items like song lyrics, or
information on TV shows. Wild days, to be sure.
That said, at one stage, unsure of what else to do online, I’d just
search for ‘chatrooms’. Not my finest moment, it has to be said – up
there with when I used to think LOL meant ‘lots of love’. That naivety
makes me laugh now, but back then the internet really was unchartered
territory. Today, I’m wholeheartedly pro-internet. Just last night, I
caught the end of a documentary on Robert Moog, the creator of the Moog
synthesiser, on TV. That led me online, searching for Youtube videos
about early electronic music; watching old Delia Derbyshire videos and
marvelling, as always, at her perfect ear for beat-matching; and then
discovering legendary Theremin players.
I believe the net has enhanced women’s lives immeasurably. Online, we
can join communities, connect with people with similar ideals to us;
find out more about feminism; and read about women’s rights in other
countries. We can blog about our experiences, in private, using a
pseudonym. We can talk about sex, contraception, relationships, in the
‘open’, perhaps for the first time in our individual lives.
Have a problem? Google it. It’s perhaps no surprise that type in the
words ‘Am I…’ into Google and the first suggestion is ‘Am I pregnant?’
But just as the internet offers freedom, it offers constraints too.
It’s not free of the prejudices which can plague life off-line – sexism,
racism, homophobia. There are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people online, and women
are exposed to the same abuse on the net as they may be in real life
situations, albeit in a non-physical manner. Though the internet offers
anonymity, and that includes the ability to hide your sex, if you ‘out’
yourself as female, or male, or transgender, you leave yourself open to
being judged on that.
I find the internet can also impinge on my real life – sucking up
precious minutes and hours when I should be working, playing on my
innate ability to procrastinate and sitting like the proverbial
shoulder-devil, tempting me with just ‘one more’ look at a new site or
Twitter feed.
But despite all of its pitfalls, I will forever be grateful for the
internet – and do not take the fact I live in a country where I have
uncensored access to it for granted. It gives me knowledge, it gives me
space to vent, and has even been beneficial to my career. And now that
I’ve learned not to spend time arguing with people on forums (that’s a
top tip there if you want to stay sane on the internet!), ‘surfing the
net’ is a rather pleasant experience indeed, even if it does have its
ups and down.
taxes for the French government in Paris. The two spent hours figuring and refiguring taxes that each citizen owed. Young Blaise decided in 1642 to build an adding and subtraction machine that could aide in such a tedious and time consuming process. The machine Blaise made had a set of eight gears that worked together much like an odometer keeps track of a car's mileage. His machine encountered many of problems. For one, it was always breaking down. Second, the machine was slow and extremely costly. And third, people were afraid to use the machine thinking it might replace their jobs. Pascal later became famous for math and philosophy, but he is still remember for his role in computer technology. In his honor, there is a computer language named Pascal. 
