About This Project

I used the internet for the first time in 1993 or 1994 to look at a live image of a coffee pot that sat in the break room of Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory. For the next twenty or so years, I was hooked.

All of the work I've done that I was most proud of, happened on and because of the internet. I've told stories on the web, made and lost friends online, early adopted and beta tested, lived, laughed, loved in cyberspace. I once accompanied a famous science fiction author on a tour of a 3d virtual world and bought him digital skin. He was not impressed. If Johnny Cash had written 'I've Been Everywhere' about websites instead of American cities, well that would be me.

About fifteen years ago I was talking to someone who worked in newspapers who told me that if they knew then what they know now, they'd have resisted the persuasions of web evangelists like me and stayed offline. Just a few short years later I can totally understand the desire to go back in time and - like Sarah Connor setting Miles Dyson straight in T2: Judgement Day - persuade Tim Berners Lee to destroy his greatest achievement for the good of humanity.

Obviously we can't turn the internet off and we shouldn't have to. It was once a place where people truly connected, felt deeply, engaged positively and experienced joyfully and I think it can be that place again. We should be trying to make every visit, click, view, scroll and share count for something and see if using the internet better can actually make the internet better.

So over the next few weeks and months I'll be thinking about different aspects of life online and writing about the things we can do to be online without losing our marbles. How we can connect, play and learn better. How we can internet more privately, healthily and meaningfully. How we can use the internet better to actually make the internet better.

Surf's up. Let's boogie.