We seem to be festooned with cyber gypsies.
In a British Heart Foundation shop in Streatham, Indra Sinha’s ‘frank account of love, life and travels on the electronic frontier’ found us as we walked past the front window.
I have gotten a third of the way through, but it’s like reading ancient history, and kind of sums up the way electronic communication has changed in the last few years.
I’ll talk more about it when I have finished it, but I get the feeling that it is a kind mirror image to the way I perceive the words ‘cyber gypsy’. For me the internet frees me up to see the wild blue planet earth, not so the vaults within.
But we’ll see. The book is wonderfully written, and draws you into its quite delicious labyrinths.
Delighted that you have found The Cybergypsies and are enjoying it. It is ancient history now, but was begun at a time when there were only a few hundred websites in the world, and “Surfing the Internet” was a stray article that could be found on the cybergypsy bulletin boards. That article, published 1992, mentioned the web as a new idea that someone at CERN in Switzerland had had, and invited people to netmail him if they were interested! I remember us, oldstyle cybergypsies, trying vainly to convince British Telecom to expand its rudimentary online service, BT couldn’t have been less interested and responded instead by closing down Micronet altogether. Finally, perhaps you’ll allow me to plug my new novel “Animal’s People”, which is out from Simon & Schuster UK in March 2007. All good cess,
Indra
I enjoyed your book immensely Indra.
I guess I could say it was the way you managed to describe the early days of the internet, whilst also juggling your personal crisis and psychological transformation at the same time (it was a damned good read).
But more so it was the sheer fluke of finding a book, called the same name as a blog I had recently started, that seemed to fill all of the blank spaces about a world I was finding myself more and more drawn to. It made everything personal. many of the names I took for granted, words I was puzzled by the etymology of were suddenly animated and oddly organic for that reason. The internet is a collection of oddballs and characters not ones and noughts, and can draw people together even if they are as far apart as Toulouse and London.
Anyway, feel free to write further on this blog as you have Author status, and if you are in London do drop by for tea.
All the best,
Dom