Internet Just Keeps On Clicking as Y2K Hits
As the millennial transition began to sweep across the time zones, the Internet did what it always does: everything.
Millions of shares traded hands on the world’s stock exchanges; businesses operated their online bazaars of books and microchips and flannel pajamas; scientists shared worlds of data with colleagues.
But more than anything, people logged on to breathe in the Internet’s essence: communication.
Multitudes of Web surfers from scores of countries used thousands of chat rooms to discuss anything from business to sports to sex, most with a Y2K spin. Often vapid, sometimes profane, the Internet’s talkers produced their always raucous cultural melting pot.
“I’m here to make contact with the world,” remarked a Filipino scientist, cruising the chat rooms at 2:30 a.m. local time while waiting for the first sunrise of 2000.
On the other side of the spectrum were the self-isolating Y2K disaster fanatics. After years of methodical preparation for massive power failures, rioting urbanites and food shortages, many were deeply shaken when a Y2K meltdown became increasingly unlikely.
“I am living in a three-room shack with five children that range in age from 3 to 13. My husband left us in November, saying he could no longer take the nagging from me on Y2K preps,” said a particularly traumatized woman using the online handle “G.”
“My children are sick and I didn’t even buy the proper things for the medicine cabinet,” said G, who recently had relocated to a remote cabin with a six-month supply of food. “I wish I had stocked a bottle of sleeping pills. I would take them.”
Other survivalists took the news more philosophically.
“If this is nothing but a bump, I’ve had fun getting ready,” noted a man calling himself “Beekeeper.” “Y2K has been good to me, as I am much more aware, prepared and self-reliant. Not to mention debt-free, armed, non-dependent on the weekly paycheck.”
Such extreme cases were a vivid reminder that at the dawn of the new millennium, the Internet offers a taste of nearly everything the world has to offer, and has emerged as perhaps the greatest proponent of global diversity, though it still has a long way to go before it’s a truly representative world medium. The new York-based research firm EMarketer notes that although English is spoken by about 8% of the world’s population, it’s the language of choice for 57% of Web surfers, 78% of all Web sites and 93% of e-commerce sites.
Still, with openness and instantaneous access as its trademarks, and tens of millions of simultaneous users, the Internet may be the most widely participatory phenomenon in human history.
And on the most basic level, it appeared to be weathering the Y2K transition with hardly a hiccup. According to the Acton, Mass.-based Andover.Net’s Internet Traffic Report--a service that measures the flow of data worldwide--slowdowns, where they occurred, resembled a typical day even in areas of the world that had already passed into the next millennium.
And it was business as usual on Yahoo, Amazon.com, America Online and all the other Web titans.
Yet beyond its basic functioning, the Internet’s mystery endures in ways that make this pivotal online moment hard to define.
Traditional media--print or electronic--record and archive their every utterance for future generations to study and ponder. Not so the Internet. With hundreds of millions of Web pages--many updated daily or hourly by millions of users--the churning, roiling virtual world is impossible to quantify, let alone capture as a snapshot on Dec. 31, 1999.
For example, no one knows how many millions of people logged on to check out the state of the world on this day, let alone what they all said online.
But however many citizens of the Internet joined that cacophony to greet the new millennium, one of the biggest questions on people’s minds Friday was whether to cocoon with loved ones or jump into the party of the age. Most employed Internet chat’s usual lighthearted banter liberally seasoned with general silliness.
“I’m getting drunk; maybe after a while I won’t care,” Shenna87 wrote on Yahoo’s Year 2000 chat group.
“I’m shrugging it off, surprisingly enough,” replied Smuggin.rm. “Staying sober and headin’ to a friend’s house--we’ll barricade ourselves--I just wish I was spending it with my lover.”
The other big preoccupation seemed to be a general perplexity about how the world has so far proved the biggest Y2K fears as unfounded.
“Either Y2K is a trillion-dollar hoax or things are not being reported!” noted one newsgroup writer.
Another responded: “Or, like most things in life, it is a gray area somewhere between those two extremes.”
