thejaymo.net

Come Internet With Me 📹

01 // A gentle web show

A web show with a gentle premise: browsing the web together. Made during the pandemic lockdowns.

Come Internet With Me cover — a person with plants in the background, with the text COME INTERNET WITH ME, A GENTLE WEBSHOW.

Cover art for the run.

Web show · 12 episodes · 2020–2021

Come Internet With Me 📹

My guest brings a subject they have seen, or would like to know a little more about. I share my browser, and we go down the rabbit hole together.

CIWM was my first experiment with an interview format that suited me. No pre-show research, no script, no destination — just an hour of open tabs, dead ends, and the occasional genuinely astonishing find.

A solid idea with plenty of potential. After twelve episodes my conclusion was that it would work better as a live stream. Maybe some day I’ll bring it back — in the meantime, every episode is still up, and my other shows are still running.

Watch On YouTube 📺
Subscribe To The Channel 🔔

The show is off air. Don’t forget to like and subscribe anyway.

02 // How it worked

One search term, two people, one browser. Everything else was improvised.

The Guest Chooses 🔍

Each guest arrived with a single search term. Hermit crabs. Nonograms. Tornadoes. Ventriloquist dummies. Whatever they had been meaning to look up.

I Drive 🖥️

I shared my screen and worked the mouse. My guest called the shots. A division of labour borrowed straight from two kids at a library computer.

One Hour, No Plan ⏱️

Episodes ran about an hour and went wherever the links went — monorails to the Battle of Fleurus, Zettelkasten to the Dewey Decimal System, jellyfish to almost everywhere.

Every Link Kept 🗂️

Every page we opened went into an Are.na channel for that episode. The trail is embedded on each episode post, so you can retrace it without watching.

03 // Start here

Four episodes that give you the shape of the thing: the pilot, a tangent about filing systems, an hour spent failing at puzzles, and the season two opener.

Episode 01 · Sep 2020

Andrew Dana Hudson Searches ‘German Hanging Train’

The pilot. Speculative fiction writer and sustainability researcher Andrew Dana Hudson and I work through the history of monorails, the 1885 dynamite balloon, the Battle of Fleurus, and the science of steel production.

Episode 03 · Oct 2020

T.X. Watson Searches ‘Zettelkasten Method’

A tour through personal wikis and hypertext, the pros and cons of Dewey Decimal versus genrefication in libraries, and the home pages of the big four “second brain” tools of 2020.

Episode 07 · Nov 2020

GOTHLIME Searches ‘Nonograms’

The most CIWM episode of the lot. We read the rules of a puzzle format, then spend a good long while trying and failing to solve nonograms together on camera.

Episode 11 · Jun 2021

Momatoes Searches ‘The Human Brain Project’

Season two opens with games designer, illustrator and storyteller Momatoes, joining from the Philippines to look into the EU’s decade-long, billion-euro attempt to simulate a brain.

04 // The Archive

All twelve episodes, newest first. Each post has the video, the show notes, and the Are.na channel of everything we looked at.

05 // Where The idea came from

CIWM was an attempt to recapture something I first did in a public library in 1995 — twenty five years on from the first time I waded into the choppy waters of the World Wide Web.

Mid 90s · A public library

Two Hours At The 286

My first unsupervised Internet was in a public library in the mid 90s with my friend Dan. Saturday morning tennis club had given way to a psychedelic assemblage of science fiction web rings, Lycos chat rooms, Sonic the Hedgehog pages and Jurassic Park fandom.

For our allotted two hours we sat at the hearing aid beige 286 and shared the experience. One of us drove the mouse, the other worked the keyboard. Very soon after experiencing the web as readers, we wanted to publish our own site too.

Dan and I spent hours curating a Star Trek and Star Wars GeoCities fan site. My memories are hazy now, but I recall animated starfield backgrounds, bright yellow text on black, grainy 256-colour bitmaps, and shonky tables and frames hand coded in Notepad. He made what would now be called pixel art in MS Paint; I learnt HTML from a beginners’ book plucked off the shelves behind us.

Zine cover of a hand-drawn sketch of Sonic the Hedgehog labelled The Sega Club on cream paper with ink. 1990s era fan art.

We were already making zines for our friends and ourselves, so making our own webpage was only natural. Reading and publishing were the same activity, done in the same room, with someone else.

The Sega Club, circa 1995.

2020 · Browsing alone

Summoned From Dark Glass

Eventually our families saved up enough for computers at home, and the library visits came to an end. Dial-up gave way to broadband, then wireless modems, then the smartphone era.

Browsing the web today is largely a solitary and private experience. The entirety of the world’s hopes and dreams, and the best and worst of humanity, summoned at our fingertips from dark glass for our personal consumption — while our understanding of the device’s complexities and operation stays shallow at best.

Come Internet With Me was my attempt to make surfing the Interwebs a communal experience again. Two people, one browser, no idea where we were going.

06 // Never miss a thing