Getting to know you...

Puff, the magic dragon, lived by his PC
And frolicked in the weblike mist in a land called Cyberlee.
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff
And brought him games and surfing FAQs and other fancy stuff, oh
Puff, the magic dragon, lived by his PC
And frolicked in the weblike mist in a land called Cyberlee.
Puff, the magic dragon, lived by the PC
And frolicked in the weblike mist in a land called Cyberlee.

Together they would chatter on ethernet's pixelled sail
Jackie kept his Outlook perched on Puff's AOL's email
Cyber kings and princes would chat with usernames
Like aussie-gal-3101 and AnAussie, that's my name.

CHORUS
A friendship is forever, but not so cyber joys
Smiley faces and icon talk make way real-life ploys.
One grey night it happens, the emails come no more
And Puff that email companion, he ceases his faceless roar.

His head is bent in sorrow, emoticons fall like rain
Puff no longer goes to chat along the cyber lanes.
Without his cyber friend, Puff could now be brave
So Puff the email writer slips happ'ly into life

© Lenny Lipton circa 1962

Remember life before computer? Or life before the web?

I have been thinking about the effects of weblife on human relations. Brought about no doubt by a rather nasty incident last week when someone became rather abusive when I asked him his name. Horror of horrors. What an invasion of privacy! Well that was HIS excuse for refusing to give it.

He wanted to join a website that I run single-handedly. There are nice people on the site - AustraliansAbroad.com. We actually meet each other - in bars and restaurants across the globe. We discuss expat life - being Australians living and working overseas, common problems, cultural differences, what's going on back home. We put our photos up online in our "Vegemite Room" named after our home country's tar-like spread that we can't live without when overseas.

A few years ago I started a database of Australians living overseas. I got the idea when someone emailed a Yahoo Group asking how could he find Aussies in Ohio. It struck me that if people registered on the site, giving a minimal number of details - host country, Australian city of origin, name and email - people could actually find fellow Aussies in the same area and get in touch socially.

It's been a huge success, and there are about 3,500 Aussies now registered.

Now beats me why anyone would assume that they had the right to join any group and remain anonymous. But this guy wanted to register under some name like wanker909, giving a yahoo address and withhold his name.

When I emailed him to explain that it was not the site's policy to have anonymous people on board, he became belligerent and started to attack the site. Of course I tracked him down and now know not only his name, but place of employment.

But it got me thinking.

That man is out of my life now. He'll be too scared that I'll let his employer know what he was using work machines for during working hours, to bother me again. But what of all the other people - not necessarily nasty ones - who have come into my life and gone, disappeared into the cyber recycle bin?

Before the web, disappearing was not so easy. You got to know someone, met their friends and became part of the fabric of their life. If you "fell out" some third party would normally try to heal the rift. Not that falling out was common.

People don't "flame" at the drop of a hat in normal discourse. But knowing that the other person is thousands of miles away, many people feel quite comfortable in levelling abuse at the drop of a hat.

Sometimes a person who has been quite friendly will just disappear. One day six emails a day, next day none. If the equivalent of this happened in "normal" life, one may even call the police, or at least ask the person's friends. "What happened to Alice? She was here all the time and now she's gone?" But the friends of one's cyber friends are unknown - as is their body language, what their house looks like, the sound of their laugh - and even their real name.

This leads me to the use of nicknames, or login names as they used to be called in the olden days. Personally I have some difficulty in calling someone scarlet-lover1921 or sexyaussie329. It colors how I conceive of them - I initially typed "see them" but of course we don't "see" these people at all.

What I don't like is that yet another layer of a person's identity is stripped when a nickname is used in place of a real name. The web is a rather an anonymous place at the best of times. We have lost visual cues, body language, voice, sight and now often even a name. We are conversing with the disembodied.

If ever robots become commonplace, we won't have to worry. It won't be a matter of them adapting to us. We'll have assimilated into their way in advance. I can see it now,, "Sweep the floor, R2-D2!"" "Immediately PrettyWoman761".

I met a woman of around 50 at a conference a few years back. We decided to swap private (as opposed to work) email addresses. Mine is "kate@juliff.com", I said. "I am scarlet-woman1234@aol.com" she answered. At least she had the grace to blush.

I am thinking that I liked it better when people had names like Peter, Sarah and Kylie. But maybe I am missing something. Who knows. Perhaps when you meet me, if you ever do, I'll proudly introduce myself as

sexylady525897@who-gives-a-damn.com

Kate Juliff
New York
August 2002