Speis

The Internet is not the wild frontier it once was. Maybe there was a time, before the mainstream caught up, when it was a lawless place where Star Wars enthusiasts could argue about Greebo shooting first and cybersquatters could sit on bradpitt.com, but that was the past.

Nowadays you're more likely to log into amazon.com to pick up the new season of Desperate Housewives, before doing some online banking and checking the Irish Times news site. Things are becoming conservative. Blogging might have been the refuge of wasters and emo kids, but now you're just as likely to be reading the thoughts of a local councillor or late-night DJ. It's nothing new, innovation is always edged by a sticky coating of drab conformism.

The Internet will soon be an extension of our normal lives, if it isn't already. At the moment there's still too much anonymity. Fair enough, one can track IP addresses and find out where a person is browsing from, but it's only a matter of time before we have a single identity online. Like an ID card for surfing or a Netscape Driving Licence or a virtual wallet. Our financial details, medical history, favourite sites, anything that is connected to what we browse will be collected in the same place.

Windows calls the information that individual websites collect about our preferences 'cookies'. Well this would be the ultimate cookie, with all the chocolate chips blobs and hazelnut shards you could handle. It would be our passport to the web but also the security bond that would keep us out of trouble, tracking herds of internet users by location, job, income bracket, sex and age. It's already started, if you use gmail or MSN or Yahoo you're already pumping all your information into your account, whether you're aware of it or not.

In other words, I've been playing with the Yahoo Avatar facility.

This is me.

At least, it's an airbrushed, reconfigured and idealised snapshot

of a combination of physical features that I found attractive

when I clicked through the menus.

The point is that no matter how regulated the Internet becomes, when you're given the option to post your picture, you're more likely to throw up an icon of a donut or a picture of your dog than you are to use a passport photo.

As the Internet continues to encroach on all aspects of our lives, I think we'll see our identity stretching between who we appear to be on the outside and how we see ourselves on the inside. There has always been a gulf between the public and personal, but never before have so many been given the opportunity to realise their 'true' selves in such detail.

If you like, you can even choose what brandnames your avatar wears.

Fcuk? Yeah.