Making Connections

Most of my first year after high school was spent living in Brazil. I’d go to a little internet cafe every few days to check my email, catch up on news in English, and try to get a sense of what was happening back home.

I got my first email address in 1995. Hotmail. That account is long-since defunct. I tried to recover it as long ago as 2005, but no luck.

There weren’t many email options at the time and Hotmail was easy and free. Tens of millions of users by the end of the nineties. In those early days you paid close attention to your total storage quota, which filled up fast. You noticed how big an email was, measured in kilobytes. A five kilobyte email was enormous! At the time Hotmail provided two megabytes—2 MB!—of free storage. That’s nothing now. Gmail’s big innovation years later was offering multiple gigabytes of space, completely free.

We were all so disconnected by today’s standards. Nearly inconceivable to remember. Out of touch with one another most of the time. No mobile phones, except in rare instances. Wireless internet didn’t yet exist, laptops did not have built-in wifi. No feeds, blogs, social media, podcasts, pings, notifications, or algorithms that tracked you through the web.

It was my least connected year over the last three decades. Phone calls were rare, once every few weeks. Posted letters took weeks in each direction.

I went to internet cafes in Rio de Janeiro. An internet cafe in Taubate, in Sao Paolo. In Greece, in the Philippines. How long did they last? I’m guessing a decade or so. Maybe twice as long in developing countries. Internet cafes were briefly part of media culture. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character visits one in Alex Garland’s psychotic film The Beach.

You paid by the hour or by the minute. When logging on, I was incentivized to get online, communicate, and then log quickly back off. Time was money.

Now the internet incentives are totally reversed: stay online, never disconnect, give us your attention, give us your eyeballs, give us your soul.

Several months in to my time there, I stumbled on a little used bookshop packed with English language literature. It was there that I found the mysteries of Michael Innes. I got into Hemingway. Bought a bunch of pocket-sized Penguin classics.

When I traveled around the city, Rio, on foot or by bus or on my bike, my soundtrack was people and traffic and the cacophony of life. This was before mp3 players or iPods. My Sony Discman, with its revolutionary antishock protection, had broken the year before, so no portable music at all. No constant soundtrack of curated sound.

I’d race along at night on my bike, weaving through alleys, hopping curbs. No phone. No music. No GPS. No chatter, no streams. Just wind in my hair, wind in my eyes. I’d veer down an alley, a new street, into an unknown neighborhood; get lost, get turned around, lose my way for a bit. I kept on pushing forward, that was my only option. There was no pulling over and staring at my glowing rectangle and swiping at it and then getting lost into it for ten minutes, standing on a sidewalk straddling the bike, oblivious and deaf and dumb, just so I could find turn-by-turn directions and feel secure. I kept moving, stayed alert, paid attention, noticed, and found my way back home.