I am a fairly frequent visitor of the Korean-American community messageboards called soompi (www.soompi.com/) One might think, "What in the world would bring you there?" True enough, I'm fairly far from a Korean American. I'm not Korean, or even Asian in anyway, incredibly white girl from the European part of Russia and on top of all that, not even American. I'm pretty sure I just missed all the checkpoints. I do speak an Asian language with a fair degree of fluency, but it is Japanese and knowing the history between Japan and Korea that should have only built up tension, should it not have?

However, I do have interest in Korean pop culture, music and fashion and while I don't understand the lyrics in music, I was able to have some fairly in depth discussions about some of the artists on these message boards. No one seemed hostile towards the non-asian girl and in fact there were some bilingual members that were willing to translate some of my favourite songs. My ability to speak Japanese did not create tension, in fact I was asked to translate on a few occasions. While the racially-based communities and forums may seem very isolated from the mainstream internet, I believe that it is not that hard to enter them to some degree and most members will be helpful and kind, and appreciate the interest in their culture from someone who has no connection whatsoever to it.
I am sure that the only time you will end up in a flame war is if you start one yourself. And in that case, you reap what you sow.

The concept of internet - technological art

Technology, mathematics, computing - some believe that everything about these is cold, heartless, dead. For some, it is because they believe anything this logical can not be considered artistic, others are just wary of artificial intelligence of any level.

Besides, the artistic types nowadays would not touch math with a ten foot pole, right? There's nothing artistic or elegant about maths.

While the websphere nowadays is overflowing with human-created graphics designs, colours, in the period while the internet was just developing (1947-1990), it can be considered the epitome of a logical, mathematical structure.

That is the point of view most would take. But is that really true? Did internet really start out as an empty shell that we just filled with art, splattering our new, artistic ideas upon every surface?
I for one do not believe this is true. Perhaps me being raised around computers since I was 2, learning to operate MS-DOS and unzip files before I could read or even coherently speak has affected my way of thinking, but I think that technology as a whole is a beautiful form of art that can only encourage us to create further. As an artist, occasional writer a lot of my work contains allusions to the internet, computing, mostly in the most basic of forms - binary, html code, etc, mostly because I find it absolutely fascinating.

Internet was created to share data and information. In my opinion there is nothing more elegant and beautiful than the pursuit and sharing of knowledge. Thus, at least the underlying purpose is artistic, is it not?

In addition to that, there is nothing more artistic than invention. If there is no place for maths and technology in art, then where does that place DaVinci? If there is no place for logic in art, where does that place philosophy, writing? Psychology? All these fields are intertwined to the most complex degree, as they are the utmost human being. I don't believe that there's a single person in this world who is not a creator, an artist of some kind. Those who write code, invent, create, those who came up with the prototypes for calculators and computers, those who created the internet, are no less of artists than those who paint landscapes and portraits. If anything, they might be more.
Expressing what they see through visual, auditory media or taking an abstract concept and actually realizing it, which one is more artistic? Can you really believe that computing is dead and heartless?