Diagram by
Nigel Holmes
Copyright © 1996, Against All Odds Productions; reprinted with permission.

Cyberspace project: 24 hours of Internet glory and infamy

It was billed as "24 Hours in Cyberspace," a live, global Internet photographic and publishing project.

To those who were part of the "Cyber24" team -- including yours truly -- it might well have been called "The Longest Day in Cyberspace."

Concocted by photographer and technology maven Rick Smolan and his Against All Odds associates in Sausalito, Calif., the project was based in San Francisco's China Basin.

The event began with the first dawn of Feb. 8, a Thursday, and finished when the last time zone passed midnight. During those hours, thousands of people earned an asterisk in 'Net history.

An energetic crowd labored at Mission Control, supported by more than 50 corporate sponsors -- a team of more than 100 editors, technicians, web designers, imaging wizards, code crunchers and other assorted high-tech artisans.

Around the globe was a hired staff -- 150 of the world's top photojournalists -- and thousands of other contributing photographers.

The fame came from pulling off one of the most ambitious on-line publishing efforts ever: creating a digital time capsule by documenting slices of life across the world on a single day.

The project's mission was to chronicle how rapidly expanding technological forces like the Internet are changing the ways people live, work and play. Months went into researching stories, locating and assigning photographers, publicizing the event, and testing the various hardware and software tools that would be integrated into the mega-event.

On Feb. 8, a coincidental news event became the project's blessing or curse, depending on one's perspective. That day, President Clinton was scheduled to sign a new telecommunications bill -- one that included the controversial Communications Decency Act that many netizens see as threatening freedom of speech in the brave new world of on-line communications.

As soon as the president's digital pen turned the bill into law at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, on-line protests erupted from all corners of the cyber realm.

Cyber24 was caught in the controversy. Some believed the Smolan project endorsed the new law, a perception encouraged by the presence of one photographer: Tipper Gore, wife of the vice president and a former news photographer at The Tennessean in Nashville.

More on the controversy in a bit.

Plunked in the China Basin district of San Francisco, Cyber24 Mission Control resembled the innards of the starship Enterprise.

In a darkened, 6000-square-foot room, much of the little light there was came from the glow of more than 50 Sun Ultra 1 workstations and 21-inch monitors, or from the swirling lights of numerous TV crews criss-crossing the room as the event grew in intensity throughout the day.

Sun Microsystems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., one of the major sponsors, also provided a number of SPARC 1000, 1000E and Netra servers, Sun Raid disk arrays with almost 300 gigabytes of disk storage and 11,000 megabytes of RAM, as well as system integration and Internet security.

Most of the 150 hired photographers were assigned three stories each. During the day, they were to shoot, process (users of Kodak digital cameras excepted), scan (Polaroid), caption (Software Construction Co.) and transmit (NEC laptop computers) their digital files via the Internet using file transfer protocol (FTP), or into a dial-up BBS (Telefinder).

The first image -- from Australia -- hit the site later than expected. Its arrival was the first link in a chain that steadily lengthened as Feb. 8 dawned, hour by hour, resulting in a frenzy of editing, image processing and web page building.

It also resulted in sleep deprivation for much of the local staff when it became clear that the plan to work in alternate shifts had to give way to a nonstop blur of Internet activity. (Consider that the first dawn on Feb. 8 came late in the afternoon of Feb. 7 San Francisco time, and the last midnight was in the early hours of Feb. 9 in California.)

Once images were successfully transmitted, they were inspected for technical correctness and editorial completeness, then routed by story theme to one of several "pods" for further preparation before being published on the project's instant web site.

A software application developed by Illustra Information Technologies, which appeared inside the window of Netscape's Navigator web browsing tool, rejected invalid entries and, after parsing the caption information into the Illustra multimedia database, passed the files through the editorial and production system.

The pod teams continuously edited and processed images for web use -- as GIF files -- using Photoshop from Adobe Systems, another of the project's three primary sponsors.

Using an automated web-building tool from NetObjects, editors turned the raw content into graphics-rich World-Wide Web stories, which were uploaded continuously during the day.

Clement Mok Designs of San Francisco (the company that designed the Microsoft Network user interface) had created a series of 30 templates, providing a range of page designs from which the collected web-heads could choose the most appropriate for each story.

In addition to images, live phone interviews were conducted with photographers shortly after they had transmitted their files. Audio clips were uploaded to accompany a number of stories.

J. Carl Ganter headed up the project's audio team, working with a staff of experienced interviewers and a number of National Public Radio correspondents who were providing additional reports from the field.

"We had some magical moments during this project, " Ganter said. "For example, Eileen McCann, one of our lead interviewers, was speaking to Louise Gubb, a photographer based in South Africa. Louise had just photographed a group of women who turn to the Internet for knowledge empowerment and communications. The women sang for us over the telephone, we recorded them and posted their songs along with Louise's pictures."

The Gubb interview and sound clips became part of a one-hour Internet (RealAudio) segment on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" program, which included additional interviews with participating photographers in several other countries, with Smolan at Mission Control and a live question-and-answer session with callers (http://www.realaudio.com/rafiles/npr/ne6f0801.ram).

"Remember, this is an interactive medium," Ganter said, "and viewers/readers/surfers have the opportunity to learn more about a story they've just read, or hear a photographer's comments about a picture ... or hear an African choir."

More than 60 stories made it on-line Feb. 8. Additional stories, photographs and audio will be added to the project's permanent web site (http://www.cyber24.com/), slated to open on March 17, as well as on a CD-ROM expected to be available this fall.

As with Smolan's other 24-hour projects, a book also is in production. Only 10 percent of the material produced during the day was available for the instant web site, according to Smolan.

The frenetic pace was not confined to the digital newsroom.

For the wire service photographers who participated -- seven digitally savvy Associated Press shooters -- the notion of being dropped into a site and facing deadline pressures to produce and deliver compelling images from anywhere in the world in real time was nothing unusual.

But for many of the hired shooters, who included prize-winning photographers affiliated with some of the top magazines and newspapers in the world, the experience was a stretch.

They learned a lot.

Jim Sugar is a contract photographer for National Geographic, and a former National Press Photographers Association/Picture of the Year Magazine Photographer of the Year. Sugar spent several days checking out the locations of his three story assignments, then scheduled his time in half-hour increments from 5:30 a.m. until midnight.

Even though Sugar was one of four photographers working in the Bay Area, he was required to deliver his finished stories just like anyone else, anywhere else in the world -- all digits, no taxis.

With 15 minutes left in the day, and having trouble connecting to the project's BBS, Sugar and his San Francisco colleagues called from the Examiner photo department where they gathered to transmit their final stories. In a clearly exhausted voice, Sugar nearly pleaded to deliver the last story via car. Sorry, not allowed. The story will be included in the permanent site.

Truth be told, in the day's waning hours, most bleary eyes were focused on the clock -- longing for the official end of the live portion of the project. No excuses would have been good enough if it meant prolonging the day beyond the anticipated bewitching hour.

"For a guy used to working on challenging projects, this was among the most challenging in which I have been involved," Sugar said in a post-mortem. "It was a level of difficulty greater than anything I had anticipated. It was almost overwhelming."

The day-long extravaganza provided not only a learning opportunity for professionals like Sugar, but for several thousand journalism and photo students from more than a hundred schools. A parallel project called the Student Underground unfolded concurrently, producing several hundred additional photo stories.

While the plan was to judge the student entries as they arrived, the overwhelming response -- along with the time consumed by troubleshooting the Mission Control network -- put the Underground materials into a temporary holding pattern.

Eventually, a number of the best student submissions were added to the project's main web site; hotlinks to additional materials housed on web sites of all participating schools also were updated in subsequent days.

The collective mass of stories attracted around 5 million hits during the first day. Project webmasters estimated more than a million people explored the Cyber24 site that day.

Surfers discovered stories about monks using laptops to connect with other temples, people tracking elephants in Malaysia via computers, a Ph.D. student who has a video camera and computer set to share his every experience live on the Internet, romances that blossomed on the 'Net -- a gamut of life's experiences now being shaped in one way or another by the global communications explosion.

One story became the on-line focal point of the day, more for its symbolism than its imagery.

President Clinton launched a global protest by signing into law a badly needed update of the country's telecommunication regulations. In doing so, he made law the Communications Decency Act, a section of the bill that had become highly controversial for its efforts to exact severe punishment for transmitting vaguely defined "indecent" communications.

The Internet teemed with signs of protest the instant it became law. Some users engaged in deliberate efforts to try to violate the decency conditions of the act. Others posted visible signs of protest -- web pages with black backgrounds, or graphical blue ribbons -- to indicate support for free speech on line.

Several prominent Internet writers and mainstream media were quick to criticize the Cyber24 project for not using its worldwide visibility to immediately focus attention on the perceived threats of the new law and to promote greater activism in challenging its ill-defined language.

In addition to its coverage of the signing and images supplied by Tipper Gore, the project did publish a strongly worded editorial by John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "One Man's Declaration of Independence in Cyberspace," as well as a story about sex on-line.

The project stopped short of advocating protest, sticking to its mission of documenting what happened in some parts of the connected world on Feb. 8, 1996.

Ironically, if the law is enforced as some fear, "24 Hours in Cyberspace" may well be remembered as "The Internet: The Way We Were."

But that was the project's intention all along, according to Smolan -- to create a time capsule of life in the digital zone at a single point in time.

That chosen moment turned out to be historic, a point of both celebration and controversy.

-- Kurt Foss

Against All Odds Productions,
(415) 331-6300.

See also: CDA update

From THE COLE PAPERS, March 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.