10 Years

Today (23 March 2006) marks the 10 year anniversary of Richard and I meeting on-line. It was a weird and surreal experience...

Richard was 'The Virtual Prisoner' at the time, based in a display room at the Telkom Exloratorium in Cape Town's V&A Waterfront. I was a student at Pretoria University, supposedly doing research for an electronics design project that day.

It is quite hard to find proper references to the woZa project now, as the site and domain were not maintained, but this sums it up:

Man 'Imprisons' Himself Online

South African computer consultant Richard Weideman has made himself the first prisoner in a cyberspace jail. He sentenced himself to 88 days in a glass cubicle in Cape Town with only a computer linked to the Internet's World Wide Web. "My only contact with society is an Internet connection and a glass observation door," Weideman wrote in his homepage (reached at Web address http:/www.woza.co.za/woza). Writing from Johannesburg, Marius Bosch of the Reuter News Service says Weideman, locked up in his "prison," Weideman has no access to radio, newspapers, telephones or television and can communicate only through electronic mail. Since the Jan. 31 start of the project, named "Woza" for World Online South Africa, Weideman has received more than 2,400 electronic mail messages. School children and businesspeople are among those who have communicated with him.

In a recent electronic mail interview with a newspaper, Weideman commented, "The profound bit is dealing with the rest of the world through a binary umbilical cord. ..... I've exchanged e-mail views and anecdotes with people from Alaska to Australia and 18 other countries in between. The exciting aspect is realizing just how similar we all are in this growing global village. How much I share in common with ordinary people in Ohio, or Honolulu."

Saying many people see the Internet only as an "information distribution mechanism," ignoring the Net's communication potential, he noted, "This results in a false belief that information flows in one direction only." He said better use of the global communication facilities available on the Internet could aid the development of many rural communities, particularly poor black communities in South Africa.

"I aim to shatter that misconception by illustrating how we can use these tools to collect vital demographic information at a grass-roots community level," he said. Weideman plans to stay in the glass cubicle, an exhibit at a telecommunications show at the Cape Town waterfront, until next Saturday, South Africa's Freedom Day, marking the second anniversary of the country's historic all-race elections.

The living and working space Weideman calls home measures 26 feet by 16 feet and includes an exercise bicycle, bed, couch and chemical toilet (hidden behind a curtain). Meals and laundry are delivered without communications and contact to the cubicle's back door to which he has the only key. But he noted that even if he wanted to break free from his imprisonment in cyberspace, he could not. "For those (with) visions of me roaming free at night," he wrote, "there are infrared alarm sensors outside both of my doors."

We communicated via IRC for some 5 weeks, before meeting in real life on 30 April 1996, which is the day of our combined birthday. It has been an interesting 10 years.

Happy 10 Years!