“Seven years before Facebook, nine years before Twitter, there was Sorabji.com. The page loaded slowly, inch by inch, to the trilling music and disco lights of the modem to reveal something an age ahead of its time: a status update box. It posed a leading question: “What are you doing?” WAYD, as it came to be known, was a waypoint between bulletin boards, Usenet and IRC, eerily anticipating the social media that we are now steeped in. People from all over used WAYD to announce their existence, profess love for persons unseen, unknown and possibly nonexistent, have hysterics, sing to the electronic void and, by the way, produce bits and bytes of fine literature. Not quite Basho, but funnily deep stuff nevertheless.”
Read the rest: “Reading into the Future” at The Indian Express.
