WR: Tom Arriola -- Debriefing, Cont'd.

Crime Scene is a very
'theatrical' Web site.

I see a lot of parallels between the Internet and theater: theater in the (decade of the) 1900s, Internet in 1990s. It used to be people went to the theater to be totally drawn in, to love the characters, and be swept away by the story. Around the turn of the century, guys like Pirandello and experimental dramatists started to play with that, started to call attention to the fact that this theater stuff isn't real, we're actors up here pretending.

Pirandello did a play, Six Characters in Search of an Author, where the audience goes to a play, they think they're going to watch a play, but actually they're watching a bunch of actors rehearse. Then, all of a sudden, some characters burst into the theater and proclaim they're searching for a play, and you end up watching a play get put together. What he was doing was calling attention to the fact that theater isn't real, it's all make-believe.

After the fact, I discovered what I was doing in Crime Scene was calling attention to the fact that everyone thinks the Internet is real. You call up a file on your screen: the population for every major city in the United States. But I could make up my own data file, and change the numbers, and have my own list of the populations of the United States -- and it wouldn't be true. But people could call it up and think that it was. It's a virtual world that confirms itself.

There's a newspaper story I created on the site, "Oxford Remembers Slain Student." I did that to not only confirm the murder, but also to confirm the validity of the Internet site. "Here's all the things Oxford is doing. They've even set up an Internet site to catch the killer."