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Welcome to CyberSpace
Canada's first regular column in a major domestic newspaper to
tackle the emerging world of net.culture.
CyberSpace appeared in the Toronto Sun every other Sunday between 1994
and 2000.
I
started writing a bi-weekly column (bi-weekly means every other
week) for the Toronto Sunday Sun's Comment section in the summer of '94. Cyberspace was
the first regular column in a Canadian daily newspaper to tackle the
emerging world of net.culture.
A
big influence on my column was K.K. Campbell's Eye.Net column. Like Campbell -- my friend 'n' long time hero
-- my aim with Cyberspace was to get people into the net, as opposed
to getting people on to the net. In the mid-'90s, most computer
writing was generally focused on hardware and software. There were a lot of
people writing about what modems to buy or how to troubleshoot your modem
but no one was really dealing with what you'd actually find online, who
you'd find online, and how to have fun with the places and people you
found. Concepts like netiquette were entirely alien to the vast majority of
people who were, at this time, taking their fledgling steps into the online
world. CyberSpace wanted to answer not the "what" but the
"why".
In
pursuit of this, Cyberspace looked at the history of computers, the culture that
created the hardware and software that wired the world, and ways readers
could have some interesting but responsible fun with these shared resources.
Oddly
enough, my column ran for several years in the Toronto Sun before I
actually started putting my column online. I can get busy. When I'm not
working full time as a technical writer, endlessly tinkering with a play I
wrote called The Man 2 Dialogs, or folding laundry, I'm sleeping or melting cheese on
hotdogs.
I
like Korea. It's the happiest place on earth! I'm not Korean,
though I'm learning
to be. Check out these pics of
my column hanging in the window
of a Korean restaurant. The advantage of having your column run right under
Sara Waxman's restaurant review column was occasionally people didn't hack out
your article when they'd hang her article in a restaurant window.
The Story so
far...
This by no means is an exhaustive list of my
columns. Just what I could piece together. Three jobs,
five computers, one Mac ... things get pretty
helter skelter.
These
are not the columns as they appeared in the Sun. They're my drafts. They
may be somewhat different from the printed versions. You
will find embarrassing typos.
Oh yeah,
they're also in the crappy text format in which I supplied them to my
editors via email. I'll get them converted over to HTML Real Soon Now.
Send me mail or learn more about me.
See Also by Me
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Copyright (c) 1994-2002 Karl Mamer
Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft
shareholder.
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