66: Tales from the Net

From PRI Public Radio International From PRI Public Radio Public Radio Public Radio Public Radio Radio International From WBE Chicago this American Life My replass well a few weeks ago we invited you to send us your stories of life on the Internet. Send unusual or amusing email exchanges, interesting things you found in Usenet groups or on web pages. Hundreds of people responded. I recorded interviews with some of them and invited bunch of parents Chicago to check this museum of Contemporary art for show today on our program what happened when all the tapes and readings and people were gathered on stage in the museum stadium.

Samaria is 19 years old, an English major at the University of Washington. And one day she's crazing the net visiting the homepages of complete strangers. And I came across this site that I thought was amazing. It was the most cutting edge thought provoking site I'd ever seen.

And so I was examining it, checking it out and I realized this guy was my age and he worked at Microsoft. And that just blew me away. I'm a student, I barely for coffee in the morning and here this guy worked at Microsoft. I ended up emailing him just to tell him how much I liked his site and how amazing I thought it was.

And he wrote back and that went on for about four or five days. Just kept writing back and forth. Really personal stuff too, not just computer geek stuff. What is the breaking world of the Internet?

Father argued that one main difference between regular life and life on the net is if you meet a stranger and get to them intimately much faster on the net than you can anywhere else. Well, for a week Mary and this guy wrote each other several times a day long personal emails. Then they agreed to meet in person at a coffee shop on Valentine's Day. I was nervous before we met because I was worried that he wouldn't find these interesting in real life.

So we met for coffee. We ended up spending the next 12 hours together. There wasn't really a turning point until a few days later we had continued to see each other and one night we ended up going out to his office at Microsoft. It was about midnight, nobody was there and we were hanging out and one thing led to another and all of a sudden we were making out and it was crazy.

And you were glad there cuz you were liking him? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean it was, it wasn't a bad thing, but it was, it was awkward because it was my first time. I had never, never really done that with anybody before.

It was your very first time actually having sex with somebody, right? Well, no, it was my first Time kissing anybody. Just kissing anybody at all? Yeah.

Cuz you had like a high school boyfriend you would deal with? No, no, I was, I was a really bludger in high school. I, I did get out lunch. So it was your first time just making out somebody was at Microsoft?

Yeah. And so it made it all the more surreal I think. It was just weird for me to think that here's this guy I met a little over a week ago by chance on the Internet. And here we are at his office doing this.

And then after that I barely heard from him. He told me that he didn't want a relationship right now, that he wanted to wait. He kept using the term. He wanted to make his first million before he had a relationship with somebody.

His first million? Yes. For all the hype about the revolutionary changes the Internet is going to bring us, what's striking about this particular story? It's not much of it could happen without computers at all.

All across America, teenage boys kiss young women on a date or two, then freak out and withdraw. All the computer adds is an era of mystery and intimacy and some exotic stage props for the drama. Otherwise the lines in the moods are very, very old after the fact. After the night at his office stand at Microsoft, I noticed, boy, he really was feeding me some lines there.

Really? Yeah. Like what else? He actually was going to set me up with a, with a copy of Office 97.

He never did the cat. At what point in the whole interaction he did promise the Office 97? Actually the first night we met, did you just think cease, feed me a lot of soup? No, I, I thought it was cool because I, I heard some things about Office 97.

Wow. I like how that. Now I'm sure you can only go back to the incredible knife tag. Some, some young man is prowling the streets of Seattle walking through the U district telling women, got your free software?

Well, the question we pose in this hour is what is happening on the Internet and are there things happening on the net that never would have happened without it? Over the past few weeks we've advertised in cities around the country inviting radio listeners to send us samples of their own emails. Samples of things they found on the net that they thought were especially interesting or amusing. We have advertised here in Chicago asking people to come here today, Museum of Contemporary Art with those samples.

Over the next hour we'll hear from people here and people around the country and unscientific sampling of what's going on in that. My co host for today's show is David Hofstein. Welcome, David. David is a playwright and novelist.

His play Trance won the French first award at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival and was produced for the Brighton Arts Festival. His play the Persecution of Arnold Patch premiered this year at Red Oak Theatre here in Chicago. And years ago, David started having these shows that he called letters shows where he invited people on stage to bring their mail to a theater and read it just as they become a big open mic. And we're adapting format of those shows to the electronic media today.

David, why don't you explain the rules of how one of these shows goes? Okay? This is a show with many, many rules. That's why we have two hosts up here.

Ira does half of them. I do the other half. The first rule is the time rule. These are egg timers.

These are mechanical devices that do not exist in cyberspace. They are cooled, will get approximately four minutes and that's what everybody will have when they're presenting. But the sample things people know what to expect. Well, these have different things.

We're going to start with this one here. This is your basic. So when you hear that, you must stop mid syllable and just exit the stage unless someone wants to start talking to you or something. So we're going to begin with Joe Fosco.

In preparation for the show, we spent many hours surfing the net together and finding files that we thought were interesting. Joe's going to come up and read some. Wait a minute, Joe, let me get this timer going here. I got to put these other ones in different places.

This one, this one I read now is a website of this guy who's building an aluminum ball of aluminum foil. And he went through quite a bit of detail about this boil. He says, I don't remember exactly how the ball began, but it is a sphere composed entirely of aluminum foil of various varieties. It is mostly candy wrappers with a few bits of foil and other food items mixed in.

So far, the best finished coat is York pepper and patty wrappers. Other foil is fine, but a coat of pepper and patty wrappers is necessary to keep it on. Gum wrappers also tend to have that quality, but they are far too difficult to peel considering the minimal bulk to have. Gum wrappers do make a good finish coat on top of pepper and patty wrappers for show.

Some items, such as Hershey's Miniatures, which look like they might be good candidates for foil, aren't. The ball is more impressive in person than this page can hope to depict. There's a picture of the ball. I don't know if you can see it and then he has this diary of its growth.

And it starts back in January. And he says, we've got an electric postage scale in the office. It reads one more digit of precision. So we now have a weight of 3.9 ounces.

I have done the math to compute the density of the ball. Curiously, it is much lower than that of solid aluminum. I have a hard time believing the ball is less than half aluminum by mass. So I invite you to let me know if there are any errors in my computations.

I expected that the density would be less than that of solid aluminum because of the small amount of air between layers of the foil, the adhesive coatings, inks, and small quantities of chocolate grease and other leftovers from the food items that the rappers originally used to package. I wouldn't have been too surprised by 5 or even 10% difference, but finding the actual results obtained a little difficult to believe. I have a question for you, Joe. Do you believe that fellow would be making that ball if it wasn't for the Internet?

I think so. See, I think that one of the discussions we've been having the past couple weeks is the Internet unique in any way. And I think that it is in the sense that people now know they have potentially millions of readers. Readers.

And whereas before a guy would make a silver ball, he made a silver ball put in his desk and all the nobody. The very interesting thing is he has a link to other sites that are making aluminum foil balls and someone else who's making a rubber band ball. But I think actually the idea that he might get some notoriety out of his ball has spurred him on to further, at least maybe with a mediocre ball. I think he's working now to make the ultimate ball.

All right, let's. Thank you, Joe. Our next reader, Stacy. Oh, this is Stacy.

I'll just set the time for four minutes. A former friend of mine from high school is currently living with her husband and son in England. And every three weeks or so, she sends out what I call a broadcast email. And she sends it to what has now become 56 email addresses.

I'm going to read one of the broadcast emails, but before I do, I think I should make two notes. One is that she refers to her husband as Bobo or Bo, and she refers to her son as Boo because she named him after Boo Radley in To Kill a Muffinbird. That's a strange choice. Granted, that is his nickname.

So she also rates her adventures with paws like bear paws. And for example, once after visiting Stratford on Avon, she said Three paws for Shakespeareville. So here's the first one that I ever received. Hi, baby.

Boo had his first day in London this weekend. We went to the British Museum, a quick stop to Harrods and really quick stops to Big Ben and Westminster Abbey to take pictures. We bought a six foot diameter beach towel that I lay out for Boo to play on. I told him that it's his boundary and if he crawls off he'll get electrocuted from the wires.

You know, like this dog training thing. Well, he does a good job of keeping me on my feet now. Before I had to watch him every second. Now I have to watch him every millisecond.

You know what this is like? It's like one of those Christmas letters. How often do you. Exactly.

But this comes, I mean, I've received, I think I've received these over the last year. And these come fairly regularly, like once a month. And for you as somebody who knows, I mean, when you read these, I mean, do you feel a sense of yes, I must know? Well, actually, what's really interesting is that she and I have grown apart and I didn't really quite know how to end the relationship.

But these emails have actually given me some closure because now you never have to say anything. I don't say anything. I mean, it used to kick down your fishy belt. And I never use, I never have to say anything.

I never respond to them. But she continues to send them to me and I have a lot of fun meeting them. And before I used to feel really guilty, like I wouldn't respond to her letters or I wouldn't be a good friend. But now I feel like, okay, well, we're just so different.

I don't want to be a good friend. Once a month it comes to you in vision. And then I just read it and I, you know, and actually I'm really horrible and I can't believe I'm admit this, but I actually send it out to two of my other friends who also, I forward it to two other friends who are sitting up there and they read it and comment back to me. I can't believe I'm saying it.

Well, she doesn't listen to the radio, does she? Well, we thought. My friends and I sat and thought about it and we thought, well, I don't think she listens to npr. What is there to write?

What is there to say? Same things happen every day. Not a thing to write, not a thing to say. So I take my pen in hand and start the same old way.

Well, for Instance that we do when people contact us, when we advertise around the country for things going on on the Net and suddenly notified us about this one web page. We were searching for people who were having experiences on the net that they would never have otherwise. And this particular page was made by a woman named Janie Ringley, a senior at Dickinson College in Penn. And a lot of people.

She created her own little homepage on the World Wide Web. There's the regular part of my page, I guess you would say, with information about me, the music I like, things like that. Like everybody has on their page. The one item that has become extremely popular though, is the Jenny Cam.

And it's just a camera that sits in my room and takes a picture every three minutes and uploads it. So every three minutes you can find out what fascinating thing I'm doing in my room. The Jenny cam is on seven days a week, 24 hours a day. The number of people who want to see what fascinating things going on in the college girls dorm room each day.

People I'm not sure, but as far as number of hits go, we get over 500,000 hits a day. A half million hits every single day. And what do people see? Nothing, really.

I write email, I sleep, I have friends over, we can watch my head, talk when I'm not in the room, things like that. Pretty much just regular college life, as far as I know. Our associate producer tuned into your page just to kind of see what's going on. And for about half an hour she witnessed you on the phone.

Every three minutes we've got a picture of you, interposition on the telephone. I talk on the phone a lot. In a way. It's hard to think of anything more banal than seeing a college student's dorm room.

I would have to agree. I would absolutely agree. I don't do anything that's that interesting. I don't have company very often.

I don't do anything more interesting really than talk on the phone, watch TV and sleep. Let me ask you to talk about the nudity. Well, whenever I'm nude in my room, I'm nude on the Denny cam. But you know, when I think about how often somebody is nude in the course of the day, it's really not very long.

Well, maybe I'm not an average person, but I figure when I'm alone, who really cares? I sleep naked and I get changed and when I get out of the shower, I'm all wet. There's no hurry to put on clothes, explain what the thriller is about being naked in front of a New frontier camera. Actually, with the camera there, I don't think about it much.

So whenever I'm normally naked in my room, that's when I would be on the camera. It really doesn't affect me in much of a big way, I would say. But wait, you're saying you're being naked in front of potentially a half million people and it means nothing to you? I think the camera would be a lot less interesting if I pay that much attention to it.

It would be more of a staged show. You can go see a stage show anywhere. I think the whole appeal of the camera is that it is whatever is normally going on in my room. And with it having been up for a year and a half now, I'm pretty accustomed to it being there.

It really. It doesn't affect me much. I would say. Have there been any moments over the last few years where you were sort of sorry that the camera was in the dorm room?

Actually, it goes sort of the opposite way. Whenever I go home for breaks or spring break or something like that, I'm always sad to be away from the camera. It's really a different feeling whenever I'm in the room and the camera is broken or for some reason it feels. My room feels totally different.

It's like I'm completely alone. So I usually prefer the camera to be there. And I'm sad when it's off as opposed to wishing it weren't there. Because you don't feel alone when it's on.

Right. Even though there's nobody actually there with me, even though I'm still alone, even if there's nobody watching the camera from the other end. It's just comforting to know that there is somebody metaphorically out there. In your view, why so many people checking out the sight of you today?

Um, a lot of people, it's totally hoping to find me getting out of the shower, getting dressed for bed, things like that. It's hoping to find the nudity. But I get lots of email from people who say that it's just nice when they're alone in their office to know that there's somebody else out there, Somebody else that is doing nothing more interesting than what they're doing at the same time. It's like having a little virtual friend.

Now. At some point, you've probably had somebody over in the dorm room to mess around. Sure. And at that point, it goes on the other person's comfortability.

I have no problem doing that. And that's the whole point of the Camera is that whatever I'm doing? When I went into this, I understood that in order to make it really work, it would have to be no matter what I was doing. But I can't really enforce that on people who are visiting me.

So if the other person is uncomfortable, then the camera is turned off or it points to a different part of the room. In general, has the other person been uncomfortable? Yes. Yes.

Was there every time you actually had somebody over where you actually kept the camera on the two of you? Yes, in fact. And the funny thing is that it never actually was broadcast because the number of people suddenly reloading on the server ended up crashing the computer that posted the game at the time. Wow.

So even though we were there and the camera was on, the server was crashed by the number of people wanting to see. What's your impression of who these people are? Oh, I don't know, mostly men. It's almost exclusively men.

I do, I get about 700 emails a day and of that number maybe 10 are from women. You get 700 emails a day? Right. What are people saying to you?

Well, a lot of those are entries to a contest on my web page called Name that Curve where once a week I put up a new picture of some close up shot of part of my body. People guess what it is. So I would say 300 or so of that number are Name net curve entries. The rest of them are people saying either I saw your webpage, I like your page, or can I call you, or can you send me private special pictures or it really, really random.

Jenny says she spends five to six hours a day answering email and what you already talked about on one hand, there seemed to be something completely innocent in what she was doing. Putting stuff out there, not really caring who sees. And if you press her about her own exhibition, she'll tell you over and over, oh, no, no, it's not about exhibitionism. It's an experiment.

Letting people view a person's entire life without editing. The one thing she's gotten on the Internet that she'd never gotten so easily any other way is she's famous within, you know, a small circle. It's a small particular kind of thing. I did get a fair number at this point of requests for autographed pictures and people wanting to buy my hair and my clothing, things like that.

It's pretty scary. Well, one time I was caught on camera actually trimming my bangs because you don't want to do that, it's cheaper. And all of a sudden I got four emails from people Saying like, are you gonna do anything with that hair? Can I buy it from you?

And what did you make of that? Well, it's kind of scary. I mean, I do meet people from time to time. Somebody will say, I'm passing through the area.

Do you think I can meet you? And you say, if. I actually have a pretty good knack for knowing, for getting a good feeling about people right off the bat. So sometimes I say no, sometimes I say yes.

I've had dinner with, oh, probably a dozen people from the Jenny can and seven nights I had one person who had a hard time taking no for an answer and after made it abundantly clear I wasn't interested. Really? That's not pretty good. It is kind of.

I've had a fair number of improper passes at the end of the evening, but it stays a pass. If there were a cable channel that would just have a camera on in your room with no sound 24 hours a day, do you think you get a half a million viewers? I don't think so. I don't think I would.

Because if you have the tv, you have other things you can watch. I think it would still be popular, but I think at that point it would be a lot less interesting because people can do this from their offices at work. If they have Internet usage that's not monitored from work, you can just put it on and leave it on the background while you're doing whatever else on your computer. Jenny Lee just graduated from college.

She's moved to another city where she's gotten new job designing webpages for big national magazine. Tell me about the Castle Net. It's in a minute. It.

This is American Life. My glass. Most weeks in a program which is a theme, bring a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. But this week we are trying something different.

We're broadcasting from the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago. We're taking what geologists might call a core sample of things happening on the Internet. Very unscientific sample. How are people using the net?

What is happening on the net that is not happening anywhere else or hasn't happened anywhere else over the last few weeks, we've advertised asking people to come here today with things they have found on the Net, including their own email exchanges. People from around the country are joining by telephone. My co host today is playwright David Houchein, who conducted these kinds of events in the past on stage. Welcome back, David.

Thank you. Another example of people's lives changed by the Internet. Eileen and Fred Kiefer with outside Columbus, Ohio. They are septuaginarians with seven kids and 13 grandkids.

Okay. When we first got our email going on our computer, I sent a message to our son in Milwaukee whose address was Kief. It was my first time to use it in a F20F's off her email was a chatty email about everything going on in the family, signed Love, Mom. So I got back a letter from someone whose address was Kief.

And he said, I enjoyed this letter, but I don't think you meant it for me. And so then I, I wrote back and said, thanks, explained I made a mistake. And he wrote back. And we've been writing now for two years.

This month, the man, the couple actually who got her email were Kiefer and Galen Mitchell in Portland. Dorban, he works at Tandian. There's a radio show out there. And when he got Mrs.

Kiefer's email in his account, the thing that actually got to him was that she signed it Love Mom. His own mother had just died two months before. His father had been dead for years. Mrs.

Kiefer said she never intended or wanted to have a long term email friendship. It seemed like we had nothing in common going in the age difference and they had no children and they're Mormons and they're Catholics. So seemed like it wasn't a lot that we had to talk about. We never have any trouble.

At first we were writing like every day. We were both so excited about this. But now we usually in touch at least once a week. And we visited and he's in Oregon, we're in Ohio.

Visited in Portland last year and spent a couple days with him and had a wonderful time. And they're like 30 years younger than we are. So we've become mom and dad and we've adopted them. We call them our illegally adopted children.

And in December, when I have serious operations, he keeps on the phone every night like the rest of our kids. So he's really become one of our kids. So what in the world was it in the first emails they sent two years ago? What could people possibly say to create a bond like that?

Oh, I don't remember. I just remember indicating that I was 70. So there was, didn't want anybody to think that we were going to have a speaker rants or anything. And then you read these stories about people doing weird things with people on the Internet.

Right. We never had that problem. We have them join in all of heavy events except one, and the ones out of town we hear from a couple times a week. One of our daughters we hear from almost daily now.

Did you have as much contact with them before email? Oh, no, no. We would talk on the phone maybe once a month and it was always, how are you? And you know, you never really were part of their lives that way you can do a bunch of them.

But in Boston and we just weren't. Well, we were always close. We weren't communicating very often. So email us.

We brought you all closer together. Oh, it's wonderful. I keep trying to talk to everybody I know until their children have access to a computer. It's changed our lives a lot.

It's just changed our lives. We. I wouldn't think of checking the computer first thing in the morning to see who's on who's writing. Evan kiefer in dublin, ohio.

Another reader. You have one there? Sure. Okay, let's go over the reader.

Our next reader Participants Steve Saiddden Steve Seddin I came across a Usernet group called Alt Amazonwomen Admirers and this is a short dialogue between two guys. I was just talking with someone and we started thinking about a couple of girls we know that used to give us piggyback rides. Here's an interesting thought. One girl was like 5 foot 2, weighed 110 pounds.

She wasn't a great athlete and didn't have a lot of muscle. And she was able to give me piggyback rides with ease while I weighed close to 200 pounds. So with that thought in mind, I'm curious to know, assuming you believe that piggyback rides are the EAS way to lift a person, which they are, how much weight would you guess? Some fitness and bodybuilding women could lift piggyback.

I mean, if they can lift 200 pound guys over their shoulders and press them overhead, just imagine how much they could lift piggyback. Any thoughts? So the response to that is yeah, here's a thought. Where are the lift a 200 pound man overhead and press in women.

Boy, would I ever like to see that. I mean, who cares about piggyback rides? A piggyback ride isn't a lift at all. The man just climbs on and all the weight is supported by the bones of the legs because the legs are already locked out.

Not impressive, not sexy. But to see a woman militarily press a man, now that's worth paying to see. My greatest thrill would be to see a tall, muscular woman pick up a tiny man under his armpits and dangle him in mid air. Impossible, you say?

Maybe. But consider this. In 1988, the women's weightlifting championships were dominated by young teenage girls. I saw a 16 year old Chinese girl snatch 165 pounds as though it were a feather.

She cleaned and jerked 231 pounds without so much as making a face. She weighed 132 pounds. Try this guys. Go to your garage and load up that old barbell with say £270.

Try to dead lift it. See how heavy it feels. Now Picture A cute 17 year old 99 pound Chinese girl, take that same barbell and lift it all the way overhead in about five seconds. So the response to that is yes, I agree.

Now we're getting close to the real thing than. Our next reader. Dolores. Dolores okay, this is a romance story.

I met this guy last fall and he worked most of the week in another part of the country. He would fly up on Sunday night and come back on Thursday night. So our romance was conducted through the net. And because he was away so much, we, we talked or emailed back and forth every day.

And I don't know if other people had this experience, but if you start going out with someone and you're writing them over the net, it's very exciting. I mean, you come home and you turn on the computer and it's one of the first things that you think about. And it really adds this element that, I don't know, I've never, I've never had before. So anyway, we went out for about three or four months and we fell in love.

But eventually things started to get. We started to get problems. Our daily correspondence became more and more strained. And finally I wrote him this email.

I'm going to read to you. Dear Sam, I feel like I'm making you feel worse and I can't bear that. I'm so sorry. I think that you should have peace and I pray for you.

I pray for that for you every day. I think you should take some time to call me when you do feel more peace. So this is very heartfelt. And I did think that he would write me back.

And after about two and a half weeks he hadn't. He hadn't written me. And this was a dramatic departure for us. And so when we finally did talk, it was like Vietnam.

There was about 36 hours of a intense meltdown and I fired out five hysterical emails which I won't read to you. And we broke up. And while we were breaking up, my computer crashed and I lost all of my email. And so I lost all this correspondence from him which was, you know, 100 pages easily.

And I wrote him and He. I told him about this, and he sent me two caches of folders. His mail in my mail. Well, at that time, you know, I didn't want to read through all of this.

It was a little too painful. I just wanted it to. I wanted. I wanted to have it.

So when I prepared for the show tonight, I decided to go back and read through it, and I discovered something, which was that he did email me back. I just never got it. And part of my. The hell.

I was in hell for those two or three weeks before we talked. So this is what he mailed me back. I discovered. It said, dolores, you're so good a person.

I'm very proud to know you and have you in my life. I will take some time and get grounded and then call you. Thanks for all your love and understanding. Well, I was flabbergasted.

It took me several days to even wrap my mind around the fact that he had sent this. And it completely altered my experience of that time and of him. And I still can't quite assimilate it, really. Do you think of.

Do you think it's possible that he faked it when he sent you the badge to be nailed? Now, this is the question. This is the question that every man I tell this story to asks me. It didn't occur to me.

And he would have had to have gone through quite a bit of trouble to do it because it is encoded with all the information. I don't know. What do you think? I yield to your expertise here?

Yeah. Okay. Thanks. I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine embraces Old dud in a small cafe the path across the way A children's carousel A chestnut tree oh, wishing well and then I'll be se Every lovely summer's day and everything is bright and gay I'll always think of you when I find you Our next reader, Sarah, is somebody who has a story for us.

This involves a guy who picked up my photo in what we call neat book for, like, incoming freshmen. It has every freshman and a little bio data. And he liked me, but none of our friends knew each other, so he couldn't meet me. And what he ended up doing was obsessing about my photo and deciding, well, I can't just obsess about her photo.

I'd like to know more about her as a person. So he sent out this broadcast message to everybody in the dorm I lived in that was on the net at the time, asking what I was like. So all these strangers responded and they just made stuff up. But it was actually very positive because what happened was he ended up writing me a letter on paper using quotes about all the things that people had said about me, that I was cheerful and intelligent and had a good disposition.

He decided I was a rare commodity. I should call him. And I was kind of cornered and calling him by my friends. But this is a story that went nowhere because he was truly not someone I wanted to end up going out with.

Do you think that the way that he decided to approach you was a tip off that that might have been? Yeah. I have to admit that the first thing he said when I called him up, because he was really nervous and I really didn't care, he said, okay, we can get together, but not Friday night, because Friday night's the ping pong tournament. Yeah, there's a sign right there.

Yeah. Well, thank you for that. The rigor. Our next presenter, next reader.

Noel. My name is Noel and I'm diastematic. Anybody here know what that means? It means that I have a gap between my front two teeth.

For those of you unfamiliar with this whole website gap two thing, I built a website for gap two people. So, yeah, aotic you want it, you've got it. But in the company 10% of America, including David Letterman, Lauren Hutton, Noam Chomsky, Supreme Court justice, Sandy Day, Connor, Zach promo chauchics, wolf of baths, all with tooth cleavage. I must admit, for better, for worse.

Yes, I'm the one who built this website, but it's the emphasis is humor. In early November last year. Wait, humor versus what? Like attacks at people without gaps.

What would be the other thing that you would do to proselytize? Somebody had to bring people over, encourage people to create gaps in their teeth. Absolutely. You work with any orthodontists?

This, this is, this is very. This will hit on a lot of those themes. All right. In early November last year, I was watching a Bears packers game and during the pream ceremony's usps, the post office unveiled art for new stamp due this summer featuring the late great Vince Lombardi, who was one of the greatest Gappers ever lived.

He was on the stamp writing high top of the team, the throws of victory, smiling huge. But something was missing. Coach Lombardi's straight mark gat tooth grinning. He had near perfect pearly whites and gab was gone.

The next day, as a joke, I ended up page of the gaptiff website protesting the post office's depiction of Lombardi as a cosmetically altered hero. Who would Don King be If you were bald or a Gorbachev without the Kool Aid stain or a Jimmy Dani without that nose. So knowing that this was one small effort to have a little fun while making a point, knowing that this was the wild oddball media like us, no real merit for his content. I expected little to no attention.

But then came Yahoo which featured it as a weekly pic. The Washington Post had me on the phone and ran a half page story with my before and after pics. Chicago's Channel 7 came to my apartment, ran a store in the 6 o' clock news just before the Super Bowl. Getting out of hand.

Yeah, time out if you're thinking this. The fact that base protesters have never received any attention. I'm in agreement with you. What was ironic about the story is that they painted me as a.

A freak. Imagine that, a super fan ready to wrap myself with bombs and blow up my teeth. And Washington D.C. if they didn't change the art.

And it was all pretty much light hearted. So Bob, the artist of the postage stamp latched back to the AP and I thought this is just fun. I mean I'm just running a website for Gap2People. You can't take me that seriously.

So I called up Bob and we talked about this. Yeah, we discussed angles and art representations. A really nice guy. I was thinking about grabbing a protest already when filmy 3 year old daughter was gaptixed and that was it.

Protest over. But what still got me today is the web has the power to make insignificant things seem real. That email can really serve as a powerful form of protest which it did in this case. And the people including myself really do have too much time on their hands.

Welcome. You got mail. Nothing about it. All the news can't take no more as you look for a stories from the net for the show especially strange things that happen to the net that might not happen anywhere else.

We found Earl Jackson. He's an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He spent a lot of time on the net. He writes about the net, has seven websites himself.

It tells his story which begins on America Online. I was on airwell and other services in San Francisco a lot and you know there are these chat rooms where gay men can meet and talk and in San Francisco it's fairly wild. There's a 24 hour bulletin board that I was observing for the study. I stream where you could almost be guaranteed that if you live in San Francisco and you have modem you could have sex any time of the day or night.

This was very goal directed bulletin board, right. People would meet God sex, right. And you know exactly what they wanted to do. And you probably have new pictures of them before that.

What I also thought was really interesting, and this is going to that there was a new metaphysics of sexuality because people would talk about cyber sex or real sex. And it occurred to me after I listened to enough a real sex, it meant phone sex. Oh really? Yeah.

So it became instead of two tier system, it's a three tier system and you have real sex, ultra real sex and cyber sex. Wait, ultra real sex you said? But I mean like what I call society of isis which means actual physical contact. Earl Jackson says he needs more and more people who hooked up with mounts and video cameras on their computers.

With the technology cluster you see made, they can look at the person they're interacting with over the net. I know people that actually leave physical dates. They go home and have sex over the map with the, you know, the quickcam calm. It's true.

There's an entire culture. There's an entire culture that's entirely video transmission sexuality. Now talk a little more about that. You actually said you actually left an actual date.

This is me in fact. Yeah, but he said that that is what he does lately. And I understood that because a lot of men are afraid of sexual contact because of aids. So the perfect thing to raticize is distance.

And so he says to you, like no, you know, at what point even if you say I'm going to go home now, pretty soon. I mean, he said that he really needs to do the see you soon. Back In December of 1993, all Jackson had a guy with the net in one of these cake chat rooms. The guy's name is Cam, lived nearby, but he had boyfriend.

So the two never met in person. Promised every day for a year they got online together and created these elaborate fantasies together online using that kind of software where you can see what the other person types as they type it and they can see what you type as you type it. We would like have a fancy about what he came for my classroom and then I took it back into my office. But it was really sort of a game.

But these narratives became so intense and that we would set times of the day and. Or he would just type in and said do you have time for a story now? And he'd start it and then I continue it and we have all these stories but as we kept doing this then a little part of his life would come in and then there would be a story that Would take us somewhere else. Then I know a little bit more.

And soon the sex part was really an excuse to tell the other stories. And sometimes he'd be telling the story about his childhood in Missouri. And they remind him of sexual fantasy. And then he put me in it.

And you couldn't plan to do things. We became sort of like jazz pianists or something. We had these riffs together. Then one day he asked me if I.

If I had time to talk to him. And I was just leaving. But I could tell that even the way he was typing was different. You could tell even the way he was typing was different?

Yes. Yes. What do you mean? People have different habits in their speed or like the way he would respond or if he didn't put a smiling face after a certain number of words.

I just knew there was something really wrong. The way he asked me if I had time and he said, bad news, son. And I think I knew instantly what that was. He tested positive and he didn't know how to break to me.

And our messages to each other. Then became a lot more about that and about what happened to him as a child and other things that were fairly tragic and amazing that he was telling anybody because he was really one of the strong sonotypes. Then this is when I should have gotten more nervous. He started saying that he didn't want any of his porn tapes anymore because he associated porn with him being positive.

So he wanted to mail them to me, and he mailed me a box of them. I didn't really want them, but he wanted to do this for me. So there was suddenly a box of porn tapes in my house. And then the following week, there was one too.

And just before I got back to San Francisco, I got a message from him hoping there was one, hoping I got the tapes. He said that I'd get another message very soon. Now he was writing to me in almost entirely in capital letters, which scared me and I didn't know why. But here's the last one.

I have it all boxed up now. I will give it to my friend. He will mail it for me like he did before. And it will arrive either Thursday or Friday via two day express.

I have a letter coming to you to help explain a few things. Thank you for being a friend when I really needed it, Kenneth. And then three days, nothing. And then this one line.

A package arrived today. One 1995. Email me Cruiser 3 by Love, Ken. And then.

Then there's there was a. On the 25th, there's one that looked like it was from Ken's screen name. But then when I opened it up, it said, this is hard enough for me to write. Ken left a note to ask me to let you know.

Ken took his own Life on Friday, January 20th. He was cremated yesterday and his ashes will be dropped into the ocean of San Francisco today. Ken's mental attitude over the last four, six weeks is very hard to describe. He was a specific case, to say the least.

Oh. Keep his account open for the next day if you have any questions or response and we'll try to answer them for you. Hence friend Dave. Did he send you a final note?

In the last package he sent me, yeah. It was the only time I ever saw him reading and that said similar things to this. Thank you for being a friend when I needed it and aroused all you. It must have been so strange to see a physical manifestation of him after, you know, the email.

It was. And what was really odd was that when he first sent the first box of tapes, he told me which tape had a scene where the two people are the ones that he imagined us to be. Now that doesn't mean that he looked like either one of them, but he knew the fancy scenario that resonated with us. So even at that point, our fantasies are constantly mediated by some other technology and which is quite high for you to imagine.

But none of this was cold. There was something so tender about this that I was very moved by this experience. After he died, did you go through a period of mourning for him? Yes, I did.

Yes. What a strange thing to be mourning somebody who you never actually saw. Yeah. Although it's real.

You know when people say, oh, the computers are making us all isolated and it's such a cold world. I've had emotional experiences in long term friendships that would have never hostile otherwise. You know, it's almost. It's almost like the whole thing.

It could be a con, an elaborate con. He would be such a creep that I. I thought of it actually because it seemed almost like a melodrama from a long time ago. Yeah.

You know, it was really topic and if I wrote a short story, I wouldn't end it this way because it was too hokey, you know. Yeah. After he died, you know how every city, your cluster is gone, how when you go back to the places we used to go with them, you'll, you know, you think of them inevitably. And this.

Then after he was gone, when you would get back on your computer, did you sense his laws? Yes. Yeah, he really felt gone. He really felt.

When I saw somebody else using his screen. I mean to get a stranger with his screen. That was really, really chilling. Earl Jackson in Santa Cruz Royal program was produced today by Paul to the Worst World rejuvener and myself, the David Hobshin Only Speak Lindancy Updike Contributor's jacket Marty Rockland Consier Fowl production of Laura Dag and Davenport.

Today's program is a co production Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Peter Cow Curator Special thanks Dennis o', Shea, Andreas Fisher and Joe Fosco. Thanks to KUOW and Seattle Today and to the people who help at the mca. If you want to buy a cassette of our program, call us at WBEZE here in Chicago, 312-832-3380.

Again 312-832-3380 our email address radioell.com you know, if you want listen to any episode of our program for free over the Internet, you can do it at our website www.thislife.org. thanks KCRW for posting sound files and tools as the boss man who designed and runs the site. This American Life is distributed by public grade international funding for our programs provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. And Catherine Kim Cardiff foundation and the listeners of WBC Chicago.

Additional funding from Double Cake magazine to enjoy this American Life. You may also like Double Take documenting everyday life through reporting, fiction, photography, poetry for your own sample issue. That's a very physical copy of something you can hold in your hand. The Toll free number is 18774.

That's number four. E o u b l e wbe 1995 Byron Latillia who insists he doesn't even know what office 97 is no matter what anybody says. He actually was going to set me up with a with a copy of Office 97 and my glass back next week for more stories of this American Life. Vri public radio.