66: Tales from the Net
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"From PRI, public radio, international." "From PRI, public radio, public radio, public radio, international." From WBE's Chicago to American Life, my glass, well a few weeks ago we invited you to send us your stories of life on the internet, to send unusual or amusing email exchanges, interesting things you've found in Usenet groups or on web pages, hundreds of people responded. I recorded interviews with some of them, and invited the ones who live here in Chicago to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, for a show. Today on our program. What happened? When all the tapes and readings and people were gathered on stage in the museum's theater. Samaria is 19 years old, an English major at the University of Washington, and one day she's cruising the net, visiting the home pages of complete strangers. And I came across this site that I thought was amazing. It was the most cutting-edge, thought-provoking site I had ever seen. And so I was examining it, checking it out, and I realized that this guy was my age, and he worked at Microsoft, and that just blew me away. Because I'm a student, I can barely afford coffee in the morning, and here this guy worked at Microsoft. I ended up emailing him just to tell him how much I liked a site, and how amazing I thought it was. And he wrote back, and that went on for about four or five days. We just kept writing back and forth, really personal stuff to not just computer geek stuff. What is the brave new world of the internet? I would argue that one main difference between regular life and life on the net, is it that you can meet a stranger and get to know them intimately, much faster on the net than you can anywhere else. Well for a week, Mary and this guy wrote each other several times a day, long, personal emails, then they agreed to meet in person at a coffee shop on Valentine's Day. I was nervous before we met, because I was worried that he wouldn't find me as interesting in real life. So we met for coffee, we ended up spending the next 12 hours together. There wasn't really a turning point until a few days later, we had continued to see each other, and one night we ended up going out to his office at Microsoft. It was about midnight, nobody was there, and we were hanging out, and one thing led to another, and all of a sudden we were making out. And it was crazy. And you were glad though, because you were liking him. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, it wasn't a bad thing, but it was awkward because it was my first time. I had never really done that with anybody before. It was your very first time actually having sex with somebody. Right. It was my first time kissing anybody. Kissing anybody at all? Yeah. Because you hadn't had a high school boyfriend who you would do that with. No, no, I was a real big loaner in high school, I didn't get out much. So it was your first time just making out with somebody and it was at Microsoft? Yeah, and so it made it all the more surreal, I think.
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