THE CYBERHOBBIT
Version 1.0
©1997 Cyberhobbit
Once upon a time there lived a Hobbit in a little cave, in a world
where there were not many hobbits around anymore, but where there
were mainly humans and human technology could be found nearly
everywhere. As you may know
"hobbits are an unobstrusive but very ancient people, more numerous
formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet tilled
earth... They do not and did not understand or like machines more
complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom,
though they were skilful with tools. Even in ancient days they
were, as a rule, shy of 'the Big Folk', as they call us, and now
they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find. They
are quick of hearing and sharp-eyed... They possessed from the
first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large
folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this
art they have developed until Men it may seem magical. But Hobbits
have never in fact studied magic of any kind, and their elusiveness
is due solely to a professional skill that heredity and practice,
and a close friendship with the earth, have rendered inimitable
by bigger and clumsier races...Of old they spoke the languages
of Men, after their own fashion, and liked and disliked much the
same things as Men did." (Tolkien 17f.)
Though they in general liked peace and quietness there could be
found under hobbits also some, who were very keen on adventures
and who wanted to know, how the world around them functioned.
This story here deals with one of these adventurous hobbits, his
name was Bilbo Cyber and he became later known as the Cyberhobbit.
Where he lived there were not many other hobbits around, but there
was mainly Big Folk living around. When he was still young he
already had the first experience with human technology. Once he
found a huge metal box, with doors, windows and four rubber wheels
parked nearby his cave. He did not have a clue how it came here
or who it belonged to, but he could manage to climb in and sit
in one of the chairs and was fascinated by all the switches, that
switched on some light, cleaned or opened windows or let fresh
air stream in. When he pressed another knot he got a real shock,
because suddenly a human was talking to him and he immediately
wanted to disappear. It took him a while to realise that the voice
was not the owner of the car, who had come back without him noticing
but the voice came out of the speaker of the so called radio.
He was so fascinated by this voice and the music, that came out
of this little box, that he nearly did not notice when the owner
of the car was really coming back. So just before the owner of
this box had the chance to discover him, our hobbit climbed to
the rear-seats of the car and hid there.
He wanted to climb out a little bit later, but suddenly there
was a loud noise and the whole box started moving. He was very
scarred but still even more surprised. He had nearly tried all
the switches but he had not found the one which made this vehicle
move and that seemed to be the whole sense of this box. The human
was not even interested in all the other switches. Bilbo Cyber
could not jump out so he had to stay in this vehicle until the
journey was over. They came to a big town were many Big Folks
lived. He was really excited and watched all these humans how
they lived in houses and machines, an artificial nature a kind
of second nature which they had build around themselves. There
were also lots of people who were starring into windows which
they called screens, listening to small boxes which they called
radio or speaking to even smaller boxes which they called telephone,
just if they were talking to another human. Some were also typing
on keyboards in front of so called computers while starring in
the sccreen. All these people were surrounded by an even more
artificial nature something like a third nature, a mediated environment.
He found this all very interesting, but after a while he was so
scarred of being discovered that he walked the long way back to
his cave. This experience left a deep impression at him. From
now on he was interested in human technology. The big machines,
like the car he had the ride with, he did not like so much. He
could not use them anyway, because he was far too small to handle
them, but these tiny electronic microtechnologies really interested
him. He was far too scarred to go back to this town and so since
then he searched every car which came near to his cave for those
microtechnological devices. After a while he had found everything
he wanted, a little transistorradio, a portable television and
a laptop-computer which was in a strange way connected to a little
telephone. He collected all these things in his caves. They stopped
working after a little while, but when he told his friend, the
wizard Gandalf about it, he managed to get them back to work with
a little magic, which he called the 'eternal power-supply'.
And so Bilbo Cyber alias Cyberhobbit, as he became known later,
started to study these media in his little media-lab and he started
to collect mediatheories and started creating his own.
He stayed now so much in his cave philosophizing about media,
that for him everything, absolutely everything was or became a
medium. Even the tree outside his cave window, he viewed as a
medium as the state of the tree told him, which time of the year
it was and that the pollution of the air has gotten worse and
so on. The tree transmitted information and meaning to him. So
for him it was a medium and so was any other object. Everything
was a medium as any object seemed to extend either his body, senses
or mind. There was no fundamental difference between the tree,
the car or the electonic media he had found.
The car he once sat in was a medium as it was the extension of
the foot and the power of his driver, electronic media were extensions
of certain senses, the TV an extension of the eyes, the telephone
an extension of the ears and the voice.
When he watched TV he could see pictures from the whole world,
when he listened radio he could listen to news from the whole
world. He felt that his eyes and ears were empowered through these
extensions.
But there was also another thing that stroke his mind, when he
once tried to use the telephone. He just dialed any number and
spoke to the voice at the other end. He tried to explain that
he was a hobbit sitting in his cave and told the voice of his
interest in media. But no matter how many numbers he tried nobody
wanted to believe him his story. They said it is not true what
he is saying, that he is faking. He was disappointed about that,
but after a while he had a tormenting thought: If the humans did
not believe in his story, why should he believe in their stories,
why should he believe in what came on the radio or in TV. Maybe
this was all not true either.
So he spent a long time thinking about the question, what made
reality be reality. He read philosophers from Plato to Descartes,
but they all seemed to say something different. He starred out
of the window and compared this picture, with the pictures on
TV and this picture once again with the pictures he could create
on his computer, which he learned to use better and better.
He at first still believed that the pictures in the TV and the
reports in the radio were representation of the reality, but it
was somewhat more difficult with the pictures on his computerscreen.
At his computer he mostly enjoyed tools with which he could create
virtual realities, games like SimCity® for example, where he was
the master of a whole world which he could manipulate like God.
Though these pictures looked very similar to what he saw out of
his window, he knew that those cannot be real in a strict sense,
because he just created them, he simulated these realities. They
were just virtual realities. Virtual reality, what a strange word?
On the one side he thought this word was an oxymoron as things
cannot be real and virtual at the same time, but on the other
side it was also a kind of pleonasm. Everything is virtual real
before it can become reality. So why not just call it reality
or virtuality?
Everything seemed to be kind of hyperreal. He soon started believing
that the pictures on his TV or computer screen were more real
than the picture 'on' his window. The picture on the screen he
could view from every angle and see the very deep structure of
them, by zooming in and out. These pictures were therfore some
sort of hyperreal. For him this was more real than the sky out
of his window, where he did not understand why there were all
the stars and why some were falling off in form of shooting stars.
But it seems as if this reality outside his window was also just
created by a very powerful computer. Maybe God was just a very
talented programmer with a incredible fast computer and he himself,
Bilbo Cyber, was just a virtual being as he sat here in front
of his computer, reflecting about virtual reality. But who cared
anyway. One thing was for sure, he was real as he could think:
'cogito ergo sum'. He was even more real as he could communicate:
'communico ergo sum'. And the pictures and sounds of his computer
were as real as the ones on TV or in the radio. All media seemed
to be media of simulation. And as he already redefined every object
as medium, he had to get rid of the old-fashioned representation-concept
of reality. The concept of reality had shifted for him to the
concept of hyperreality.
Oh, that was a lot of thinking for little Bilbo Cyber and after
having a last look out of his window, where he could see the virtual
science fiction reality of the sky, he went to bed, but even there
he could still not stop thinking. So the question what reality
was even followed him in his dreams. In this night he had a dream
where a voice invited him to Cyberspace and promised a paradise
program.
Immediately he woke up and suddenly he remembered that there was
on his computer a little folder with the title 'Cyberspace', which
he had never open and tried what was in there. So he switched
on his computer and clicked the cyberspace-button, suddenly the
telephone, that was still connected to his computer started dialing
a number and on his screen appeared a message from another computer
with the words: 'You are accessing the internet. Welcome to cyberspace'.
What was this cyberspace? As he soon found out, cyberspace was
a fuzzy term in between science fiction and social reality. But
for him it was real anyway.
Cyberspace was obviously a space one could visit in using a computer
and a telephone and suddenly he started to understand what the
whole thing with the computer was all about, why so many people
in town he had seen were spending so much time in front of them.
It was all about accessing Cyberspace. He just felt like many
years ago when he was sitting in a car for the first time, playing
around with all the switches and missing the point what this thing
was all about: driving. He always had an uneasy feeling about
the computer, so far it was just a wordprocessor and game-machine,
but not a medium of communication like the other devices he had
picked up. Now he understood the real sense of the computer: it
was all about being online. It was a medium of communication and
a by far more powerful than his other devices. a computer was
a kind of teleport to a parallel worl, a new dimension, which
the Big Folk had created. They saw this space which they also
called Cyberia as something like a new continent to explore, like
they once explored America and in doing so they even thought to
come to a new step of evolution, to something like posthumans.
And in fact there was a lot to do in Cyberspace. He spent weeks
trying everything out what he could find there, but the possibilities
seemed to be endless. He browsed through thousands of newsgroups,
where people were discussing and announcing any kind of things.
He surfed through the WorldWideWeb, where he could access millions
of pages, virtual libraries and whole digital cities. There he
could also spent a lot of time just listening to music, watching
pictures or videos or even playing games. The whole WWW was for
him just like an interactive book with many million pages and
instead of a table of contents it was organised by hyperlinks
which made the whole thing totally different to reading a book,
because he himself created the whole story by reading it the way
he wanted to read. And in this book he could walk around with
a little avatar he built up once.
He was this way already accessing information from the internet
for weeks when he had a dream at night again, a very long one
this time. A kind of strange wizard was talking to him:
And the good thing in cyberspace was also that he was not alone
as a hobbit there. There were many other hobbits around. Once
while walking around in a 3D-MUD he saw a very beautiful female
Hobbit, Cinderella Hobbit and he immediately fell in love with
her, they even married in a big church, but nowadays they were
divorced again. Once he also came across an ugly animal called
Gollum, with whom he had a fight and in fact Gollum ate our little
Cyberhobbit alive.
So this is the end of the fairytale, the Cyberhobbit, as the hero
is dead. Well not quite, Cyberhobbit was namely something like
immortal, well not really immortal, but he could have as many
lives as he liked. He could travel in time as in space, and so
if he died he just logged on again, with a new or his old avatar
and in fact when he met Gollum again, he was prepared better this
time and in fact was the winner of the fight this time.
There are many more adventures of Cyberhobbit which could be told,
but Cyberhobbit still could not forget the phonecall he once had.
Why did this person not believe that he, Cyberhobbit himself,
was real. He tried it again, rang somebody up and told him his
story, but one again the voice at the other end did not believe
him. In the internet he never had problems with his reality status,
just on the phone it was kind of different.
Maybe, Cyberhobbit thought, he was just a digital narrative, just
a virtual identity, which a poor little student had created to
surf around the internet, hanging out in the IRC and in MUDs,
for the sake of writing his dissertation. So maybe he himself
did not have any reality outside of his digital existence. Maybe
he was not representing something real. Well, but who cared anyway,
whether he was a representation or just simulation, he had something
to say and so he started writing down his mediatheory.
And if he is not ready so far, he is still writing today...