Category Archives: Lost in Cyberspace

Elvis Online 8/28/1997

Elvis Online 8/28/1997

by H.B. Koplowitz

I was never much of an Elvis Presley fan, which may explain my lackluster review of Elvis websites in 1997, on the 20th anniversary of his death (Aug. 15, 1977). Or maybe the websites were lackluster (two years later, a similar review in the Los Angeles Times came to a similar conclusion). I did manage to mention an early legal dispute over fair use of copyrighted content, like music and photos, on the internet, and “Web rings,” an early way to navigate the World Wide Web before Google brought a semblance of order to the chaos.

He may have sold a billion records and starred in 33 movies. His musical blending of blues, gospel and hillbilly may have popularized, if not created, rock and roll. And his swiveling hips may have done as much to usher in a social and sexual revolution as pot and the pill. But on the 20th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, cyberspace commemorated the King of Rock and Roll mostly with Elvis sightings, Elvis impersonators, and, of course, Elvis merchandising.

Exhibit A is “Elvis Lives @AOL,” America Online’s Elvis Web site (keyword: Elvis). By virtue of its 8.5 million subscribers, AOL is the default zeitgeist of the Internet. For its 20th anniversary “memorial” to Elvis, AOL offered some vintage pictures and thumb-sucking essays, but mostly impersonators and sightings, courtesy of Hecklers Online, along with a slide show “in which President Clinton talks candidly about what the legend Elvis Presley left behind means to him.” Oh boy. Not to mention “The Shop,” where you could purchase Elvis sunglasses, CDs and other items.

Elvis gets much the same treatment on the rest of the Web. Consider “Disgraceland,” which is billed as a “humorous tribute to Elvis, his fans, zucchini, Reno and a variety of related and unrelated subjects.” It also boasts of having more Elvis links than the Vienna Sausage Factory.

Some “Disgraceland” links have serious content, but most are kitsch, such as Elvis wedding chapels, Elvis velvet paintings, a zucchini made up like Elvis, and images of the King superimposed on Mount Rushmore and the Sistine Chapel. Especially notable is Friz-Elvis, the world’s first (and hopefully only) budgie Elvis impersonator, i.e., a [Photoshopped] parakeet dressed up like Elvis. There is also a cow tipping page, which doesn’t seem to have much to do with Elvis, but what the hey. And for the 20th anniversary of Presley’s death, The Disgraceland Gift Shop was offering a limited number of original Memphis newspapers from August 16, 1977.

“Disgraceland” is a stop on the “Won’t You Wear My TCB Ring,” or Elvis “Webring,” a sort of guided Web tour where Web surfers can click from site to related site until they return to the first site. The creator of the Elvis Webring is Lex Raaphorst, a Dutch Elvis fan. Other sites in the Webring include one for signing a petition to clone Elvis, “Americans for Cloning Elvis,” and “The Uselessness of Elvis,” which has a link to “The Flying Elvi,” the skydiving Elvis impersonators who appeared in Honeymoon in Las Vegas.

Raaphorst also hosts “Elvex Pages” which is one of the most complete and easy to access repositories of Presley song lyrics, along with a tasteful filmography of the King’s 33 mostly forgettable movies, replete with movie posters, cast and plot summaries.

At the bottom of many Elvis Web sites is the disclaimer that they are unaffiliated with Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., which owns the trademarks to Graceland, Elvis, and Elvis Presley. The disclaimers are the result of an early skirmish over copyright infringement and the Internet involving “The (unofficial) Elvis Home Page.”

While touring Graceland with her mother in 1994, space industry technician Andrea Berman came up with the idea for a Web page that included a virtual tour of the mansion using picture post cards and sound clips of Presley’s music. Her Elvis home page soon became a popular site. Then the folks who own the real Graceland, Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., claimed copyright infringement and threatened to sue unless she remove her virtual tour and sound clips. Rather than go through the legal hassles, Berman pulled the items from her site. [Or did she?]

The “Official Worldwide Website for Elvis Presley’s Graceland” <elvis-presley.com> has no virtual tour and no Elvis sound clips. Except for a sanitized biography of the King, along with Graceland tour and gift shop information, it doesn’t have much else either.

There is, however, at least one Elvis site that focuses on the primal Presley, the one before the Beatles, before the jumpsuit, and before the Colonel. The “Elvis Lives In Evil Levis” Web site contains some great photos and interactive content focusing on the ’50s Elvis. The creator of the site, Anne C. Stinehart, is a graduate student working toward a PhD in medieval history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Go figure.

© 8/28/1997 by H.B. Koplowitz, all rights reserved.

2. The Beat Goes Online 8/21/1997

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs

The death of William S. Burroughs, whose book, Naked Lunch, influenced my writing, inspired me to make my second column about dead beatniks and beatnik websites.

The Beat Goes Online 8/21/1997

by H.B. Koplowitz

Poet Allen Ginsberg and writer William S. Burroughs were seminal figures of the Beat Generation. Both died of heart attacks earlier this year. But their legacy lives online in the Web pages of beatnik aficionados.

Ginsberg, 70, died April 5 in New York City. Considered the poet laureate of the Beat Generation, his raw lifestyle and poems, including “Howl” (1956), embodied the beatniks of the 1950s. In the ’60s, he helped Timothy Leary popularize LSD, attended Ken Kesey’s Acid Test parties, and coined the term “flower power.” A Buddhist and pacifist, he was a calming influence at antiwar protests.

Burroughs, 83, died Aug. 2 at his home in Lawrence, Kansas. The stone-faced author is best known for his experimental stream-of-consciousness novel Naked Lunch (1959). Like “Howl,” it became the subject of a precedent-setting obscenity trial for its explicit sex, drug use and violence. He influenced artists such as David Bowie, Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and in later years became a visual artist, wrote screenplays and appeared in the films Drugstore Cowboy and Twister, as well as a Nike TV ad.

One of the most cited Beat Generation Web sites is Levi Asher’s “Literary Kicks.” Dedicated to Ginsberg and On the Road author Jack Kerouac, “Literary Kicks” has tribute pages to both Ginsberg and Burroughs, with links to other online memorial pages created after their deaths.

The site also has pages on Neal Cassady, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso and other beat luminaries, along with beat news, films about the beats, Buddhism, the origin of the term “beat,” and beat connections to such rock groups as the Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan and, of course, The Beatles. There’s also a link to “The Germ,” a Web site on the Pre-Raphaelites, a rebellious group of post-Romantic/pre-Bohemian painters and poets that lived over a century ago in England.

Asher is a 35-year-old computer programmer, Deadhead and fiction writer who lives in New York City. He is part of a loosely knit community of creative writers who have used the Internet as an alternative outlet for their works. His “Queensboro Ballads” website consists of stories and short prose packaged in the form of an early ’60s folk-rock record album.

He also has arranged live fiction/poetry readings featuring other Web writers, and recently co-edited an anthology of Web writings, Coffeehouse: Writings From The Web, that was just published in book form.

William S. Burroughs

“The William S. Burroughs Files” is the oldest Burroughs website, having begun in 1991 as a newsgroup list of Burroughs recordings. Creator Malcolm Humes has turned it into a multi-media Web page cataloging Burroughs’ diverse works, with links to other Burroughs information, audio and video.

The site has a memorial page with a comments/guestbook area for Web surfers to share their thoughts, memories and anecdotes about Burroughs. Humes, 35, dabbles in computers and alternative music. According to his Web page, he lives “in a storefront in Berkeley which makes a nice huge space for playing music and working on other creative pursuits.”

“Like if it’s got anything to do with wild bohemian cats and chicks, you’ll probably find it here,” says Colin Pringle, webmeister of “The Wild Bohemian Home Page.” The site includes a beat generation archive, with articles about or by the beats and beat generation related sites. There’s also a “Hip Dictionary” and Who’s Who of hipdom.

But the site is more focused on the ’60s, with links to pages about hippies, Ken Kesey, the Grateful Dead, Hells Angels, Rainbow Gatherings and Woodstock. Pringle, 44, was born in Glendale, Calif. His family moved to Dallas, Texas, where he gravitated to the hippie scene and altered states of consciousness. He moved back to the West Coast in 1987.

America’s favorite beatnik, Maynard G. Krebs, played by Bob Denver, with Dwayne Hickman as Dobie Gillis.
Courtesy JStor and Shout Factory

A new cop on the cyber beat is Christopher Ritter, creator of “Bohemian Ink,” which bills itself as “an on-line review of the history and future of experimental literature & poetry.” The site has extensive information on Burroughs and Ginsberg, along with links to other beat artists.

“Bohemian Ink” also keeps up on “Modern Boheme” with news and links to “Indies” and “Current Experimentalists” including Nicole Blackman, Eric Bogosian, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, David Mamet and Henry Rollins. It has links to other literary online publications like “Pen & Sword” and “Alt-X,” and publishers of alternative literature like PsychoTex Books & Music and ZERO Press. There’s also links to sites on neo-futurists, performance art, spoken word reviews and slam poetry (“the bully brother of spoken word”).

According to a bio found in “Pen & Sword,” Ritter is 23 years old and lives in Dayton, Ohio, where he is a full-time student and part-time coffee bar tender who enjoys experimental writing.

© 8/21/1997 by H.B. Koplowitz, all rights reserved.

1. Cybersex and America Online 8/14/1997

photo by Ann Hirsch

In my mid 40s and welcoming a midlife crisis, in 1996 I left my stultifying state job in Springfield, Illinois, and moved to Los Angeles, the city of second chances, where I tried to become a freelance writer. My first gig was writing CD-ROM reviews for a free weekly in Burbank called “Entertainment Today.” This was a cheeky thing to do because I’d never played a computer game, and the only thing I knew about CD-ROMs was that my computer didn’t have a CD-ROM drive, so to write the reviews, for which I was paid $15 apiece, I would need to buy a $2,000 computer.

Multimedia reviews evolved into “Cyber Nation,” a column on another subject I was just as ignorant of — the Internet. But truth be told, one corner of cyberspace I did have some familiarity with — and not-so-coincidentally chose for my first column — was the primordial chat rooms of America Online, which was the Facebook of its time. Called the “People Connection,” users could join so-called chat rooms of a dozen or so people who would congregate based on age, hobbies, occupations, and, significantly, romantic interests.

Unlike a modern video conference or Zoom meeting, with audio and video, AOL chat rooms were text only, affording the privacy to pretend to be someone else — or to be one’s true self — and to find others who shared similar proclivities. Suddenly, people with deviant desires had a way to anonymously find each other and exchange text messages exploring mutual interests in, e.g., BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism), “gay and lesbian,” daddy-daughter roleplay, and other taboo inclinations. After hooking up in a chat room, AOL subscribers could “go private,” which meant one-on-one texting, and sometimes sexting, except without photos (which required e-mail).

While it seems downright prim compared to the kinds of sexual interactions that take place online today, people texting erotic fantasies to each other, sometimes while mutually masturbating, was called cybersex. And people who spent too much time online having cybersex (or just surfing the web) were known as cybersluts. Just as Facebook has been accused of poisoning society by allowing “fake news” and hate speech to proliferate, AOL had unwittingly spawned a virtual sexual revolution that threatened to disrupt the social order.

Except for imagination, cybersex did not engage any of the five senses, so it was unclear if it constituted cheating. The problem was that cybersex sometimes led to phone sex, which sometimes led to real sex, which sometimes led to new relationships, but also to broken relationships and broken marriages, not to mention sexual assaults, pedophilia, prostitution and financial exploitation.

The reason I knew about AOL chat rooms was because, for a brief period of my life, I was a certified cyberslut. In fact, it was in the chat rooms of America Online that I met and fell in love with the Los Angeles woman I had left Springfield for and was living with when I wrote my first Cyber Nation column. (We remain best friends.) At the time, America Online was charging subscribers by the minute, so during our cyber courtship, our AOL bills shot up from twenty bucks to hundreds of dollars a month. Then AOL decided to allow unlimited usage for a set price, and the popularity of AOL soared, nearly crashing the internet.

The premise of my column was that sex had not merely found its way onto the internet, but was playing a pioneering role in commercializing and popularizing new technologies, from VCRs to streaming video and e-commerce. But the folks at family friendly AOL weren’t about to agree that sex had played a role in the company’s success, and by extension, the internet itself.

Cybersex and America Online 8/14/1997

by H.B. Koplowitz

When America Online began offering a flat fee for unlimited use a year ago, it seemed like a win-win-win situation. Subscribers would pay less for unlimited service, advertisers would gain millions more online customers, and AOL would reap the profits. But there was one factor the company overlooked: Cybersex.

Cybersex is nerdspeak for something that goes on in AOL’s People Connection, or “chat rooms,” where users flirt in real time by typing sometimes explicit messages to each other. While AOL provides some 200 services, from stock quotes to computer games, the People Connection may be the company’s killer app. Chat is the one service AOL does better than anyone else, and for those who are into cybersex, it is highly addictive.

AOL spokesperson Wendy Goldberg dismisses cybersex as a non-factor in AOL’s popularity, or in the massive system overload that occurred when the company switched to a flat rate. AOL expected usage to increase by 50 percent as a result of the flat rate. Instead, it doubled, in all areas, Goldberg said. She said AOL is the world’s largest on-line service provider not because of cybersex, but because it is the easiest way to get on the Internet.

Then again, she said AOL users are on the Web only 20 percent of the time, compared to 80 percent spent in AOL proprietary areas, including 25 percent in the 14,000 chat rooms of the People Connection.

PCMeter, an independent measurer of Internet use, found in April that the most-used area of the entire Internet was AOL e-mail, which transmits 15 million messages a day. However, the next highest rated AOL services were Buddy Lists (5th) and Instant Messages (6th), both chat features. The People Connection ranked 12th, compared to Computing (8th), Entertainment (13th), Marketplace (16th), Games (21st) and Today’s News (22nd).

It is easy to understand why AOL would downplay chat. In the culture of the Internet, chat is at the bottom of the hierarchy of services such as e-mail, the Web and newsgroups. Also, AOL’s chat rooms have generated a lot of controversy over obscenity, censorship, pedophiles, infidelity, even homicide.

But in going to a flat rate, AOL turned a cash cow into a loss leader, while creating a virtual modem gridlock, resulting in busy signals and pissed-off subscribers. Membership skyrocketed from 6 million before the flat rate to more than 8.5 million today. At one point 8 million AOL members were trying to dial in on only 200,000 modems, a ratio of 40 subscribers per modem, when a 12:1 ratio is considered optimal.

For cybersluts, many of whom who had a monthly AOL Jones in the hundreds of dollars, it was like telling addicts they could have all the heroin they wanted for $20 a month, then cutting the supply. Talk about panic in Needle Park! 

In response, AOL invested $350 million in system upgrades. It invested millions more in reimbursing customers who sued for loss of service. Goldberg said AOL considers 20 subscribers per modem sufficient, and that “we’re getting there.”

According to Inverse Network Technology, a Santa Clara, Calif., company that rates service providers, customers trying to log on to AOL in July during peak evening hours were unsuccessful about a third of the time. Although better than the dismal 80 percent call failure rate INT found earlier this year, AOL is still a long way from the industry average of a 9.5 percent failure rate.

Ironically, if AOL was trying to put competing Internet service providers out of business by charging the same price while providing more services, the impact has been just the opposite. Because AOL’s direct lines are so often busy, more members are using the smaller ISPs to get on AOL. However, these smaller ISPs now face the same problem as AOL. The more their customers lurk in AOL’s chat rooms, the more their resources are strained.

To recoup revenue lost by going to a flat rate, AOL began selling ads that appear in the chat rooms. It also has marketing agreements with a buyers club and a long-distance phone company. But following angry protests, the company shelved a plan to sell members’ phone numbers to telemarketers. Another way AOL can generate revenue is to go to a tiered service, similar to cable TV, charging one price for basic services and an additional fee for “premium” channels. AOL recently began doing that by offering “Premium Games” for $1.99 an hour.

But rather than targeting children who play games, AOL ought to be going after the true bandwidth hogs: cybersluts who play in the adult chat rooms of the People Connection. Charging for cybersex might be harsh medicine for cybersluts. But it is in their own interest, as well as that of AOL and the entire Internet community, for them to slack off instead of jack off.

© 1997-2021 by H.B. Koplowitz, all rights reserved.