BUDAPEST -- For me internet is paradise. It
is as if I am sitting at a table full of
appetizing foods after suffering from chronic
starvation. Or like being a beggar who finds
herself in a department store that
incomprehensibly gives out everything for free.
When I surf the web it is as if am going around
with my shopping cart piling it up with all the
bounty I was deprived of for so long.
I suspect my experiences in getting on line from
this part of the planet are different from what
prevails in the United States. For example,
whenever I have peeped into chatrooms I have been
made aware that many Americans find it
troublesome to contend with too much available
data. For me that is not a problem. I love the
info glut and I wallow in it for in a very real
way it has been the computer and the internet
that made me free.
I am a freelance journalist and writer. When I
first came to Budapest from my native Romania six
years ago on a fellowship to study American
Civilization, I had hardly seen a computer. They
were notaccessible at home. Here at university
they were offering a class in computer basics. I
signed up. At the beginning, the lab in my hostel
was not particularly enticing. It was littered
with old coke cans lying around and most of the
keyboards had malfunctioning keys. I was
apprehensive as I watched many of my colleagues
who seemed to be spending most of their hours in
front of the screen playing games or flirting
with unseen correspondents. I feared I might
become another flat-bottomed zombie lost in the
boggy confusions where virtuality and reality
intertwine. But at the same time I was fascinated
by the writing possibilities and I persevered.
After suffering through the basic frustrations of
losing documents and poor mouse control I became
so attached to my keyboard and screen that my
fellow students now refer to me as The
Graphomaniac. I think the term connotes some
respect. I certainly do not feel any shame for
spending as much as 14 hours a day at the
keyboard and having produced a roman fleuve for
the last two years in addition to term papers,
plays and journalistic works.
After I learned how to use searching engines and
e-mail, I was dragged very quickly into McLuhan's
"global subconscious" mesmerized
byinternet possibilities. The process was and
remains thrilling. I often forgot to eat, sleep
or attend drab lectures and cut down on non cyber
socializing. To communicate instantaneously with
someone far away was exhilarating, all the more
so since I come from a part of the world where
before '89 letters were routinely censored.
Seldom would a letter from abroad even get to
you. Now at the touch of a key I could be an
insider, au courant on dozens of subjects from
Pampers to Cubism.
Suddenly I had access to information that I never
knew existed. It was like a fairy tale. I
registered for news groups and learned how I
could instantly find experts who could answer any
question I could think of.
I remember how in the beginning it scared me and
made me fear for my safety. I grew temporarily
paranoid, thinking that hooking into the world
was something like opening your door in the
middle of the night to an unknown caller. I
remember one spooky fantasy in which I was
tormented by fears that somehow the emanations
coming over the screen would hurt my child.
For someone who grew up in a Transylvanian
village when the Ceausescu regime was in power
such metaphors come naturally. Who knew who was
lurking out there, miscreants, crooks, evil
doers. But in this regard my relative isolation
offered some security. After all, most of my
correspondents were with addresses in America and
the Atlantic Ocean provided a comforting moat,
since in my fearful fantasies I could not imagine
anyone paying the airfare to come knock on my
real door shouting, "Hello! I am Bloody Jack
and because I was disturbed by your resentful
opinions regarding my views on muckraking
literature I am here to kidnap your child."
As my dialogues widened, the fears vanished. I
ventured further and every step paid off. No
longer did I long for books, that our libraries
didn't contain, or, indeed, never knew about. It
is true I didn't have the money to order them
over the ocean, but with e-mail I was able to
find kind and generous people who sent me the
books I learned about. Call it internet begging,
but it has served me well. Or if no one helped me
with the book itself, I could type a word and
boooom! loads of pages related to my topic of
interest were there on the screen.
In this way I was able to write my thesis on
American New Journalism in less than three months
amazing my aging professor
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the information I accessed. He said that a decade
ago students drudged for at least one year to jot
down scraps of material in dusty libraries,
cursing the lack of books.
At the same time my fiction writing efforts, all
in English, erupted madly primarily due to e-mail
pals. I had many questions about many things that
troubled me and couldn't find a solution here.
They listened to me and offered advice. It was
like telling the story of your life to total
strangers on a train but in this case you were
not limited to those just sitting in your
compartment. I felt safe and from my real e-mail
correspondences there grew my first, as yet
unpublished, novel. I assume that by now other
writers have used this device, though I have not
yet read any. Still even if I do not end up
claiming the invention of a literary form like
Truman Capote, I am grateful to e-mail for
harnessing my imagination.
A website seemed intriguing. Among other things,
I thought it would allow me to avenge myself on
the Hungarian, Romanian and English language
newspapers and magazines that saw fit to run my
articles in trimmed or even eviscerated form.
With a website I could post the articles as I
wrote them with the hope that somebody would
notice them.I do not mean to poor mouth, but in
the interest of accuracy it should be stated that
a single mother like myself who earned what I
earned from journalism in Hungary would under
normal circumstances be foolishly extravagant to
think of a Home Page.
But God provides, or maybe there is some kind of
compensation due to those of us who came of age
when life was routinely preposterous. In any case
I was granted an internship at the Radio Free
Europe in Prague where I was trained in HTML
language and obtained cyber citizenship. I have
my own page. It is one of millions. It is
probably modest as such pages go. But I am there.
When I first got my cyber space I joyously
thought, "I am free now. No one can confine
me anymore. Farewell editors, visas, borders... I
am free and people will hear what I have to say,
because I have something to say."
Well, it is not quite like that, but almost. For
one thing I still haven't figured out how to make
money out of all the writing. But I am working on
it. Now as I hunt for work assignments in the
U.S.A, fellowships or internships, I don't carry
or send portfolios by costly snail mail. I just
suggest a visit to my web site. At the very
least, I have already saved money on paper and
photocopying expenses that can nowbe spent for
toys or ice cream for my son.
I realize that in some circles, blatant careerism
might be considered vulgar or unseemly but I also
think that allowances must be made in the case of
a Transylvanian woman who spent her adolescence
watching movies and wondering how she was ever to
escape a picturesque but oppressive life seeming
to offer just two possibilities: either teaching
at a primary school in a rustic landscape of
muddy roads, gaunt faces and boozy bumpkins, or
being buried alive in a dusty small town where
nothing was ever likely to happen.
Confronted with such a terrifying prospect due at
the end of my stay in Hungary, the internet
offered escape and salvations. Thanks to it I
found out about Creative Writing graduate
programs that didn't exist at all in Eastern
Europe. I rushed and applied to eleven American
universities. A good many have accepted me and
while the problem of finding ways to pay for such
blessings have not yet been solved, the internet
has also yielded some ideas about where to seek
resources.
By now I have realized there is nothing at all to
be afraid of, and maybe one day, if I am lucky
enough to make my way to one of those
universities, I too will be complaining about
being overwhelmed by allthe available
information. But right now like someone who still
remembers an old hunger, I will take every byte I
can get.
Thank you very much.
The New York Times, April 30, 1998 |
