The Modem is the message

Diana Wichtel tackles cyberspace - The final pop culture frontier

By Diana Wichtel | Tuesday, 14 November, 2000

I have a love/hate relationship with the net. More like hate/hate, really. It’s difficult to like something that treats you with such open contempt. I try to surf, lord knows, but all I get are messages telling me I’ve committed an error, that the site is unavailable and/or would I care for some pornography?

A simple quest to find a good review of The Sopranos can take hours of wandering, hopelessly lost in cyberspace.
Even my email is against me. When I try to open it, it warns me – twice –that I am about to leave a secure connection and that others may be able to view what I send. Isn’t that the whole point of email? And no one I’ve ever met gets spammed like I do. At last count there were 265 unwanted messages in my Bulk Mail.
So when the editor of this publication asked me if I’d like to write an internet column from a newbie perspective, my considered response was “Are you out of your @#$%ing mind?”
But for a pop culture junkie, cyberspace is the final frontier. Where else can you find more pop, culture and junk?
I decided to feel the fear and do it anyway. It may even stop my children from scoffing. One of them has a web page. Another can program in Java, whatever that is. The nine-year-old can install software and download like a pro. The household’s alpha male is an IT journalist. Even the dog has appeared on The Herald’s Your Net page. The time has come to stop waving helplessly at my relatives from across the technological divide.

The New TV
Television critic is my day job. So where better to start than with some sites that have ambitions to put me out of a job? There are any number of entertainment sites that feature original animation and film. Many are next-gen outposts, with a young, male audience in mind. Be prepared for sex, drugs and farted performances of hip hop music. Think an electronic Loaded, but even more undergrad. The idea is to be free of the artistic constraints of mainstream media but God made editors for a reason.

Icebox
Still, I got lucky with my first site, www.icebox.com. Which means I could find it and I didn’t have to download anything. This sort of subversive genre is made for parody. Icebox does a nice mock 50s family sitcom. I watched an episode called “Making the Grade Better”. Little Benji cheats at
school. Dad works for the FBI – “Say, Jim, some of the fellows are going to intimidate a union organiser. Wanna come?” - and gets Benji’s teacher thrown out for being a commie queer. Excellent. Also recommended are the on-going adventures of Mr Wong – “The touching story of a girl and her 85 year old Chinese houseboy!”
Icebox has a talent roster of real writers and producers, including the creator of Ren and Stimpy and a South Park writer or two, but what makes these sites a potential threat – or resource- to mainstream media is that anyone can play.

Atom Films
www.atomfilms.com likes me. I accidentally registered myself and it now greets me with a cheery “Welcome dwichtel!”. I’m feeling better already. Though I wouldn’t have got to first base with this site without the help of a tame geek (highly recommended if you can get one) to download bits of media software for me. The latest version of RealPlayer took 22 minutes. Microsoft’s MediaPlayer took 43 minutes. The good news in they are free. And it was worth the wait. One of Atom’s offerings, Talking to Taka, featured a real actor, The Karate Kid’s Pat Morita. Cool. Though, what with the buffering – breaking up of the streaming video into chunks my slow modem can swallow – and the feeling of watching on a postage stamp as seen through fog, television doesn’t need to be afraid. Yet.

Trailervision
For trailers for movies not yet made – and many of which are unlikely to be - try www.trailervision.com. Though there was something familiar about American Booty, about a middle-aged man who falls in love with someone’s ass.

Wirebreak
For a sort of television from Mars experience, there’s www.wirebreak.com, an interactive site featuring twisted game shows and a show where they go around with hidden cameras (button cam!) and push ordinary people to Wirebreaking Point. Warning: when I tried to interact, the video disappeared. There’s mock educational Debunker, which finds answers to punters’ queries – such as, is there really a swimming pool dye that turns red when people pee? Their motto: “There are no stupid questions, just stupid answers.”

Eruptor
Aiming to be a Gen Y one stop shop is www.eruptor.com, which greets you with a blast of music, animated series, DVD, video and game reviews. Check out Foo. His friend Jim – “I’d love to hang but I’ve got to swang my thang” – is the aforementioned one man hip-hop wind section. Scary.

Radz
After that you may need a little art. On the local front, take a look at www.radz.co.nz. As we go to press, it has been I announced that 50 of the arty Radical Ads that offer some relief during TV4’s ad breaks have been sold to an overseas web site. I watched dance diva Mary-Jane O’Reilly’s Hen Party. Dances with chickens. It was about a minute long and took over six minutes to download. Which says a lot about the pain to pleasure ratio of my experience of the net so far.

email: diana_wichtel@idg.co.nz