I got my very first e-mail address: 187069@sbuniv.edu

At this time I was barely into computers, let alone into the internet. I had a Macintosh Performa 476. I didn't know it could get online until 6 months later.

At my university, we would meet in the computer labs and simply type anything into the WebCrawler search bar. The internet was like a library for people who know how to read but had never seen a book. It was addicting and awe-inspiring at the same time.

Home on Summer break, I dialed up with AOL at home with username idgieaw. I had something like 30 free hours of AOL, a 2400 baud modem, and I instantly started chatted online.

Chatting online was incredible. My first friends were vannyg in New York, a sophomore in college at SUNY-Oneonta, and indigofan in NYC, an elementary school teacher who I found via her personal profile--she loved the Indigo Girls. To make it more interesting, I actually called these people and talked on the phone. Not to wrack up more expenses, but to assure ourselves that the other was a real person. Vanessa (vannyg) would call me late at night and sit on her porch, smoke her Parliament cigarettes and tell me about life in Rochester. Allie (indigofan) talked to me a couple of times so that I could hear her thick New York accent--we exchanged mixed tapes of our favorite music.

I met lesbians online not for meet-greet-sex talk, but because I was young, I felt alone in the world, and because I felt like I was one of the only girls in the world that liked girls. Was I normal? Was there anybody out there? There was.

Occasionally I would meet people who would chat up a storm with me for a couple of days only to drop off the earth. Were we getting too close? Were their girlfriends getting jealous? I still remember that there was a woman in Colorado who was trying to help me sort out my life when all of a sudden I never heard from her again. Ever.

Though I suppose it could always been possible for these people to be complete nutcases, I never considered it. The people I met were genuine and we are still friends to this day, Allie and I more so than Vannessa. But that's another story.

For surfing purposes, I switch to the free dialup I could get through the Green County library...it was text only. Which wasn't so bad on a 2400 baud, but it wasn't very pretty.

The non-online girlfriend I had met during my first year of college quit school three months into our freshman year. We were well on our way into our 2 and a half year long distance relationship. When she started college again the fall of 95, she immediately got online and we began emailing. Emailing was so much cheaper than phone calls, so I didn't have to work as much at Breadeux Pisa to make ends meet.

Since most of us didn't have any sort of chatting outlet, but still wanted to meet and greet more strangers from different parts of the country, most of us turned to some sort of text chatting software that I can barely remember, let alone name. It started you out by having you fill out this gigantic questionnaire about who you were, what you liked, etc. I'm sure it was targeted at romance, but the result was pretty entertaining. Susan and I just used it to chat sometimes, and she made a friend who fell head over heels in love with her. I think his name was Paul.

At school, I used my first scanner. I was an English and Art major but had never even realized the world of graphic design. Once I used the scanner and figured out the tools of Photoshop, I was off and running.

In order to make school a more affordable option, as well as the fact that I no longer "fit in" at a Christian university, I switched schools. To keep tabs on my friends at my old school, we traded emails back and forth. Unfortunately, the new school was a little "behind the times" and didn't offer dialup to their network in our dorm rooms, and their email service was unreliable and not really worth using. Unlike the town I had previously lived in, my new college town had a local AOL dialup number so I was back into AOL and chatting with my two old friends and using it for email.

To me, the internet at this time was all about email. Email email email. It was a way to keep tabs on friends at my old college, plan trips, update contact information, send crazy one-liner love letters. Even the fabulous email where we think it's fun to type one word per-line going down vertically on a page. My friend sent me a rose @~`~,~~~~ and it wasn't even cheesy, it was cool.

I didn't even for a moment consider that these crazy random webpages were something I could make. In school I was studying print graphic design. Web-design was still something for the geeks on the other side of the campus.

I also took it upon myself to show the internet-less the joys of the internet. At regular intervals I invited friends to my dorm-room for sessions on, "what the internet has to offer them" and they left ready to figure out the school's logging on system and hop on board the email/internet train. Of course some of my friends and roomates wanted to abuse the good ol' Performa 476 for chat sessions. But I can distinctly remember watching the group of people around me experience the same highs and roller-coaster lows I had had had with the internet up to this point.

And of course, it was almost a given, anyone that hadn't been on the internet before would want to see if it actually had porn.

Meet and greet online friends #1

On a half whim, I boarded an Amtrak train in St. Louis and traveled by rail to New York to visit Vanessa.

Meet and greet online friends #2

Just before Christmas, I boarded a plane and headed to NYC to visit Allie and her girlfriend Julie. Julie was a bit hesitant, as she feared I could still, after all of this time corresponding, be a crazy psychopath...who were, at this time, making regular appearances on talk-shows.

Once I got there though, she forgot about my being a potential axe-murderer and we painted the town red.

So for me, the internet then lost a lot of it's charm. It became just an ordinary bit of my daily activities; I checked my email. Occasionally I used it to check the dates of concerts or to look something up for school, but it was primarily just another thing in my room.

For me it had already seen it's hayday. Like a hand-held calculator to a mathematician back in the early 70s, the internet had been unreal and Space Odyssey unbelievable. But now, just like the fact that calculators now fit on watch faces and only cost you 5 bucks at Wal-Mart, the chance to be online had become less exciting.

Meet and greet online friends #3

Before a summer school trip to Sweden, I tried to make some friends in Europe. The one person I met, Leila, invited me over to hang out while I was in the area. We made plans for me to stay for two weeks after the school trip was over, but my parents decided against it. So all in all we had just one afternoon and night together, having a great time with Eva, Leila, myself and a couple of their friends.

This happens to be a very important part of my ride on the internet, because Leila happens to be the girl whose girlfriend, at the time, was Eva. Only all of this happened 4 years later. No, I didn't break up a happy home.

I got to Sweden and the school had an open-all-night internet-ready computer lab. I went completely nuts. Not only was my interest rekindled by being able to do research on Europe, and the mere coolness of being able to send email from Sweden to the US in a matter of seconds, I considered for the first time that I too, could make a webpage.

I got free space from GeoCities and created my very first webpage including the now depreciated <blink> tag. I didn't know how to connect one page to another so what I made was basically one gigantic scrolling page that took eons to load. I included 2 pictures that I made while in Sweden and they were completely uncompressed (because I don't know any better.) It was my first real attempt at making a place for myself on the net.

I began to toy around with the internet and webpages and soon realized that I really wanted to learn more. Where could I learn this stuff? We didn't have any classes on it at school...

It just so happens that a part-time web job opened up at a place where I had already interned, a Fortune 500 company called Legget & Platt. I had already worked in their print design department drawing sofas for hang tags and making logos for furniture companies, and now I was going to work on websites. There I learned Cyberstudio GoLive (now Adobe GoLive) and I made my very first real webpage. The images were compressed, the index page linked to other pages in the pages directory, and my home on the web was now complete with a portfolio.

I was a print-trained graphic designer who got very little support from my design teacher when I revealed that this is what I thought I wanted to do.

I went to a portfolio show and I was the only one with a computer. Amid displays and gigantic black portfolio cases with the plastic inserts, I set up the computer beneath the table and set the monitor on top. Welcome to the new world.

I researched online for places I wanted to live and find online agencies in most of them. My dad gave me the keys to his truck and a credit card for gas and motels...and I made a grand sweep through Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri.

At every stop, at every agency along the way, I took in a flowerpot of purple mums with my newly created book-like miniature portfolio businesscard sticking out instead of a card. Various art directors looked at my stuff online and within a month I had two job offers. By the time I graduated I had only 3 weeks until I was off to Cincinnati to work for a place called GalvinKemper.

My new boss hadn't even met me. But the internet was his view into what I could do. We exchanged emails. We talked on the phone. I graduated with not only a degree, but a job as well.

The internet became my job. Webpage after webpage for people other than myself. My site sat there static and unchanged...barely updated to Cincinnati. When I got to Cincinnati I had even purchased my first domain name: http://www.andreawilkinson.com with high hopes that I would update it often, but I didn't. By the time I came home from work, the computer was the last thing I wanted to see.

Mid-year I happened upon a thing called Napster and it's Macintosh counterpart, Macster. If the internet has given me anything, it's music. Over the course of a few months, the three of us on the 4th floor at GalvinKemper downloaded thousands of songs. Once we got the burner, we said goodbye to CDs.

An updated portfolio was a way into grad school--into the University of Cincinnati.

Since I had already updated my portfolio, I figured, why not send it to San Francisco? A day before I got my official letter of acceptance into UC, I accepted a job with an internet startup. They had flown me out, written me emails...and liked me for what they had seen in the internet and what they heard in email after email. 3 weeks later I had already packed up, moved cross country, and headed to my first day on the job.

Mid-route to California, I dropped off a computer for my parents. My mother immediately caught on, and by the fall we were Instant Messaging. She began planning trips and finding her own airline tickets all online. Her excitement was contagious.

By this time I had already become an online consumer. I bought my books, movies, airline tickets, car insurance, stocks, and paid my credit card, telephone, and mobile phone bills all online.

Tellme was an internet startup and the stuff I was doing was being shown to a large audience, much larger than anything I had done online at GalvinKemper. Creating banner adds that would be viewed 3 million times over the course of a few days, working on the corporate intranet, company site, and OEM projects, I touched my website maybe twice.

When I reconnected with the Belgians I had met 4 years earlier, and began to woo the girl I now call my girlfriend, the opportunity for online conversations popped up again. Though over the course of our relationship Eva and I have spent only 6 weeks apart, the better part of those 6 weeks was spent online.

One of the coolest things we experienced while chatting was using the talk feature of instant messaging. I would sit at my desk in the great warehouse that was Tellme, and work away while she told me about her days activities through my headphones.

When http://www.bracketland.com came into being, I had great plans of an eternally updated, always picturesque masterpiece, but as with most hopeful upstarts, it's been a long process. Though not complete, there are hundreds of pictures online...there just happens to be hundreds more.

Another updated portfolio and it found me with a hopeful feeling that I would have the chance to do art again. Transmedia entered the picture, and it's been everything I've wanted it to be.

Now let me tell you what I want the internet to be for the next few years.

All in all it's been meeting people, seeing places, buying tickets, portfolios, work I've done, old poetry, static stories that are barely valid, changing mission statements on front pages 5 times in a day, banner-ad clickthrough rates, lines of code, image compression, Instant Messaging and email.

But for me I want the internet to be something new...alive.

A promise for new pixels every day. The same pixels in different formations guaranteed. No longer a part of me in an effort to get a raise or a new job, but a part of me because I'm willing to share it.


If there is a better meaning to Transmedia, I do not know it, for this will be taking a medium I know pretty well and using it in a different way. This year(s) is not an embarking onto something new in it's entirety, this is just the birth of yet another peak in my relationship with the internet.