Telestai

If you, dear reader, were at my Arts 50 final project presentation today, you should know that all of this was in fact a fabrication.

In continuation with my critique of the Internet as a flawed resource for building communities, albeit successful and wildly popular, my dear friend "Prairie" does not actually live in Queens, NY...in fact, she is a fellow student at my university who lives just a few minutes away from me. The tricky thing about the Internet is how easily disbelief is suspended, and how many people can so easily believe anything they wish to believe.

In my presentation, I created a "human" model of a friend who I had met through the Internet. Using a cardboard box, an ordinary office chair, my clothes, newspapers, a glue gun, nails, house paint, and LOTS of duct tape, "Prairie" was born--except she had a laptop for a head. Through the Video Chat feature on Mac computers, I was able to introduce her to my entire class in real-time.

Initially, I was afraid that something would go wrong. With something as fragile and risky to rely on like time, I couldn't afford to make too many mistakes. Prior to hauling my project to class, I made a mental note of the possible worst-case-scenarios I could face, and prepared alternative means to continue with (should something happen during my presentation). Of course, right as I finished loading the project into my car, the base that served as the "neck" I would rest the laptop on snapped off. With t-minus twenty minutes left until my presentation, I couldn't afford to go back to my apartment and glue-gun the pieces back together. I crossed my fingers and hoped desperately that after re-assembling the neck on to the body frame, the structure would hold my laptop for at least five minutes. Five minutes, that's all I asked...

I came to class early to make sure that everything would run through smoothly, technologically speaking. As an audience, I know how frustrating and time-consuming it can be watching someone fumble with blocked websites, delays in downloading, etc. Fortunately, I only needed to bring up this blog site and make sure that Prairie was logged on to her computer at the same time I was, so that we could Video chat at the same time. Everything was good to go until two minutes before class, I got a text message that made my heart sink down to my ankles:

"Got a flt tire. Im running L8 but Im close to my apt so Ill be there asap!"

Of all the days, right? Luckily, I was third in line for my presentation, so I had a good 10 minutes to hope that she would get to her computer in time. About five minutes after class began, I got another text message:

"Im here!"

I had told the TA, Marc, of my dilemma, and warned him that I might have to be moved down the list so that Prairie could have time to set up the webcam...but praise God! Everything worked out and with just a few minutes to go, I was set.

I'm not a very good public speaker, and tend to get nervous very easily. Sweaty palms, red ears, the whole nine yards. With all of the silent chaos that had happened in the span of half an hour, my level of nervousness was multiplied, resulting in me talking like one of those announcers at the end of medicine commercials who can say a paragraph of information in 0.265 seconds: "Serious risks associated with this drug include glaucoma, increased body temperature, tingling in arms and legs, fatigue, seizures, and occasionally, death..." It was a good thing my professor told me to slow down in my speech, because I was so nervous I didn't realize I was speaking so fast!

I enjoyed making this project, and it was even more fun having the class interact with Prairie as though she really was someone that lived somewhere far from California. Initially, I had planned to use my friend in Paraguay to do a real-time video chat with, but with the time + language difference, it was more practical to simulate an Internet relationship with someone I knew I could count on 100% to be available between the hours of 1:30 and 3:30 on December 12, 2007. On this blog, all of the activities we did and times we "hung out" are fabricated and slightly exaggerated, although it is a small example of the thousands of people around the world who do begin online friendships--whether it be through gaming (in such group-based computer games, like CounterStrike or World of Warcraft), sharing images on a public photo-based community, or other social networking sites like Facebook.

Last week, one of my classmates presented a blog in which he made up different comments by random users, and challenged the class to discern which users were real and which users he had created. The majority of the class believed that half of the users were genuine...when in reality, my classmate had invented ALL of these different personas, pouncing upon the critique of how easily people will believe what they read on the Internet. To my understanding, much of my classmates did believe that Prairie was someone I had never met in person based on the information they read on this blog and what I told them. Beneath the murky waters of the Internet lie millions of untold secrets and bits of information about who is really on the other side of your computer screen.

I hope that my presentation wasn't too misleading...but at the same time, if it was, then I suppose it was a success :)