When going online was hard, you were going somewhere. Or were you? Were YOU?

Andrew Shapiro argues in his essay "The Disappearance of Cyberspace and the Rise of Code" that

the idea of a separate online "space" may have made sense to a certain cohort of computer hackers who appropriated Gibson's term. The Internet in the early 1990s was mostly a medium used by computer savvy individuals--researchers, activists--who engaged in dialogue in vibrant online communities like The Well. These pioneers who explained the wired life to the rest of us were dedicated users of interactive bulletin boards and of "chat rooms." To them, going online may well have felt like going somewhere: to a digital salon full of friends. It was often a laborious process, with a fair degree of unpredictability and randomness. But all this was part of the challenge--and the reward. Indeed, the sense of an arduous journey likely contributed to the romantic idea that cyberspace was foreign and far away, a frontier to be settled.

That struck a chord with me. When I was a postdoc at U.C. Berkeley, and first discovered the Web-- around 1992 and 1993, at exactly the same time everyone else did-- getting online was hard. It could take an hour to establish a TCP/IP connection-- an hour of hitting the redial button, and watching the little green lights flicker on the modem (why were there so many of those lights, I wondered? what were they saying that I couldn't understand?), waiting for that magic sound of the handshake between my modem and the network's.

In short, going online had the feeling of travel: it was strenuous and time-consuming. Indeed, in 1996 law professors David Johnson and David Post argued that since going online-- dialing up an ISP, and entering a username and password-- was the equivalent of going through customs, and thus that "[c]rossing into Cyberspace is a meaningful act that would make application of a distinct 'law of Cyberspace' fair to those who pass over the electronic boundary."

Have I just romanticized the experience of going online in the early, heady days of the Web? Am I oversensitive? Or did the difficulty of getting online contribute to a sense that you were going somewhere, that cyberspace was separate from ordinary life?

This isn't just rhetorical. I'm genuinely curious. People who comment will be in danger of being cited in my article. You've been warned.

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