What I mean by 9 years of cyberwork experience is the time I worked using e-mails, web, developing cyber personality.
Cyberwork is means of communication. But unless one controls the degree of use of this communication, one ends up with just words, and images. It is similar to that of watching television before the arrival of www. A lot of information both real and made up, but it was just that.
My finding is that communication is vital, but the value of cyber communication is worth 1/1000 of real communication or 1/100000 of real experience. Looking back, no matter how much e-mail communication we do, ideas that really worked came from real experience, products or real things made came from working with people face to face. Friendship stayed … just friendly online. Ideas stayed just ideas online.
More sensible people had known this, so they limited their time on cyberspace to minimal, spending more time working, gaining real experinece using their hands, body. Example of this would be architects and designers who created real things with real impacts. Cyberworld would celebrate these real work, but whatever the time one spent on cyberworld, one helped to make silent buzz, which soon faded into just silence. I participated rigorously in the creation of this silent buzz for years. Then gradually, it didn’t feel good anymore. So I spent less and less time online, but found that through real travel and real activities with real people, I was getting incredibly more out of every day, every hour.
I can feel the shift of values within me. The wonderful cyberworld has become massive communication entity that doesn’t offer solution. It’s a library. I surely don’t want to spend major part of my waking hours day in and day out, just at the library.
FUJIKO SUDA 