24 Hours In Cyberspace
The Age
Tuesday January 30, 1996
Scenes in cyberspace capture the world.
Cyberspace technology will blend with everyday events to portray the new global culture in a massive photojournalism project, reports Lisa Mitchell.
CAROLYN Baird is deliberately staring at a blank wall as she talks to me. It's the best way, she says, to gather her thoughts to communicate. Like her four children, Carolyn is ``recognisably autistic". Carolyn lives in Newcastle and for four hours every day is on the Internet operating a support group for people whose lives are affected by autism.
It's vignettes like that which will feature in the next mammoth project to be launched by American photo-journalist, Rick Smolan, principal architect of the Day in the Life of . . . series of books and CD-ROM.
This time it's 24 Hours in Cyberspace, and Carolyn's work will be chronicled next month on the World Wide Web, along with other similar stories from all over the world. In 1982 Smolan produced A Day in the Life of Australia, a coffee table book of spectacular portraits that captured the essence of our nation and how we live. After it was completed he vowed never to undertake another project like it, but a sort of destiny overtook him. He now has about a dozen under his belt.
Now he is undertaking his biggest project yet with a team that has worked 18 to 20 hour days since September to bring it all together.
``We're pretty burnt out," he said by telephone. ``We're running on fumes now."
On Thursday, 8 February, more than 200 photographers around the world will spend a day fusing photojournalism and new technology, the Internet, to document a new global culture.
In East Palo Alto, California, one of the most dangerous ghettos in America, a privately funded social-action group called ``Plugged In" gets drug-addicted kids off the street and into a storefront, building home pages for Silicon Valley executives.
In Rwanda, the Diane Fossey Foundation's new GPS/satellite uplink will post twice-daily position reports on gorilla groups and poachers while grieving friends and relatives will leave mementos in hundreds of online cemeteries.
In Brownsville, Texas, a sixth grade class will don astronaut suits to run real-time space missions with other schools in Hong Kong, the USSR and the UK using real data from the Johnson Space Centre.
It's just another day in Cyberspace.
Back in Australia, for Sue Jackel and her five year old daughter Laura, the Internet-based support group for autistics has proved invaluable.
Laura has Asperger's Syndrome which is in the autistim spectrum.
It causes some abnormal social behaviors. She doesn't look people in the eye, and, when a situation becomes too stressful, she runs around in circles yelling at the top of her voice.
Her mother has discovered that she is not alone in finding ways to help her daughter cope with the condition.
``I've found the Internet useful to find educational games for Laura. She had trouble learning to tell the time, so someone recommended a time-learning program. We did a search and found it using Archie, downloaded and installed it.
``Laura played with it obsessively for four weeks and never looked back. Now she's telling the time in digital and analogue!"
These are just some of the assignments that will appear live on the 24 Hours a Day in Cyberspace Web site on 8 February.
On that day, photojournalists will carry digital cameras from Kodak, some equipped with PCMCIA cards that slot into NEC laptops with built-in modems for fast image transmission back to Mission Control. There a team of editors will slot the best shots into interactive templates for fast, easy mounting on the Web site. Most of the text is already prewritten.
``It's the newsroom of the future," said Smolan.
Melbourne photographer, John Gollings and John Maramas, another photographer in Sydney, will each capture cyberspace, Australian-style.
One assignment involves a woman who has obtained her master's degree from Queensland's University of Technology while living on an outback sheep station. The Ferny Creek primary school in the Dandenongs will get a mention for developing a training package that teaches students in Coon Rapids, Minnesota, how to program Internet Web pages.
Some of these stories will be instantly compiled and mounted on the project's Web page for thousands to see on 8 February.
A more complete Web site will follow on 17 March and after that a hard cover book, and a CD-ROM of the event with hot links to Web sites covered, will be sold around the world.
Smolan's team is keen to assign more stories to Australia and is still looking for ideas.
See The Age home page for a link to Smolan's site or e-mail your ideas directly to him at ricksmolan@aol.com The official site, for more information, is http://www.cyber24.
com.au The home page for information on Asperger's Syndrome is http://www.vicnet.au/vicnet/community/asperger.htm.
The vicnet disability home page is http://www.vicnet.au/vicnet/Adrian/ disab.htm
© 1996 The Age
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