The New Yorker:

From 1995: E-mail was last year’s way of communicating. This year is about making a Web site, an on-line space where millions can visit you.

By John Seabrook 

During my first year in boarding school, I lived in a large open room with thirty-five other thirteen-year-old boys. It was like a model built to observe aspects of primate behavior from above. Each boy had an alcove and a curtain to pull in front of it, but the other boys did not regard what was within the boundaries of that cloth-and-plywood square as your personal space. These days, other people, like my fellow third formers, can wander in and out of my on-line personal space almost at will. In going on-line, you make some of your personal space available to other people; that is partly the point of the exercise. In this sense, on-line home life is closer to socialism than anything most people in the United States experience at home. At Brook Farm, the famous transcendentalist experiment in communal living which existed in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the eighteen-forties, the main community building was called the Hive—the same metaphor that Kevin Kelly uses in his recent book, “Out of Control,” to describe social life on computer networks.

A home in the real world is, among other things, a way of keeping the world out. If you buy space in what used to be a warehouse, gut it, and hire someone to turn it into a home, as my wife and I did, you invite the world into your life for a while, but when the work is done you have walls and a threshold. Of course, you never shut the world out entirely, just as we will never get rid of all the little packets of sugar that the guys who built our loft brought along on the job with their coffee, but at least you have your privacy. It’s like being inoculated with a little bit of the world, which makes you better able to survive the whole world.

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