A Conversaton with Elizabeth
1998
Wired Magazine

From:            larry.m.mixson@bvs.com
To:              Elizabeth
Date:            Wed, 24 Feb 1998
Subject:         Wired Magazine

Cover from Wired April 1996
Photos below from same issue

I believe there is a missing email at this point for Elizabeth’s next email starts with Shery Turkle and she says she never heard of the word “Netizens” which makes me think I sent her an email about both. At this time I had been reading Wired magazine for some time after first picking up a copy at the airport newsstand for something to read on the flight for some trip for work.  I think I selected the issue because it had an all-silver cover (January 1995). I really liked that first issue of Wired and soon subscribed to the magazine which I read from cover to cover each month. Sherry Turkle, featured in the April 1996 issue, was the first woman to be on a Wired cover and I think I sent an email to Elizabeth mentioning Turkle and Netizens.

Ad from issue

Wired magazine had an interesting variety of articles on technology, trends, people, business, politics and sometimes just some strange stuff. Wired pushed the extended the bounds of journalism past any magazine I had read before.  One of the things that distinguished Wired from other magazines was its graphics, not just the graphics for the articles but the graphics for its different sections, and advertisements. It almost seemed that companies that advertised in the magazine tried to out do ads in previous issues by other companies. I almost liked the ads as much as the articles.  The ever-changing graphics extended beyond the articles to the regular sections of the magazine which had a different format and graphics in each issue. At the beginning of each issue before the Contents were several pages of interesting and sometimes wild images and text about the main article in the magazine.  

The magazine had regular features and columns each issue like the Tired vs Wired column each which listed down and up trending things. There was the “Raw Data” page which had interesting and informative data presented in graphical form, one of which was the mapping of the Internet in 1998 with one of the densest nodes on the graph being AOL. Each issue had a regular political column titled “Netizen”, a newly coined word combining Internet and citizen with the 1996 issue subject of “The GOP Big Tent is Full of Holes, For republications, construction and information-age political majority means holding together a collation of freedom-loving libertarians and sex-hating, gun-toting, gay-bashing puritans. Impossible? Probably.” A relevant topic for the GOP even today.

The opening cover pages for the Turkle story.

And then the main article

“Mainframes were modernist, but computing slipped into postmodernism when people got personal computers.”
 
“Computing continues its postmodern odyssey though the Internet to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae.”

 

Turkle