The genre of photos that once resided on mantle pieces, photo walls or intimate personal photography albums, usually reserved for family members and intimate friends or lovers, are now selected, scanned, digitally manipulated, then embedded in html in amateur home pages for the world to see. These stored images, pixilated data bits, constitute a reality, create a history, and ensure immortality in the cyberheaven of the world wide web. Parents publicise their private mourning and write memorial web sits for their dead children, reinventing the internet as a cemetery, a gateway to digital afterlife. The banalities of life, the anxieties and insecurities, as well as the rites of passage, are re-coded and stored for our collective intimate view, becoming part of our collective memory, constituting the continuity of the collective subject. Tokyo Safety in distance is maintained as net cams perform the useful functions of scanning building entrances to see who is arriving, focus on pigeons living on ledges, or update images of the level of coffee in the coffee pot down the corridor, so that one will not have to walk there to see if it is empty.
Private space becomes public space.
Everything on the net can be accessed by anyone on the planet who has access to a computer and a modem. A user may be surprised to discover that the embarrassing mail they accidentally posted to a mailing list is indexed by search engines under their name, without any discernment as to the nature of the information. Data is data to a computer. What is on the net is public and it is not truth or fiction, the domains of pubic and private are not delineated. Artists like Canadian Cary Peppermint use this lack of electronic discernment as the basis for online work.