NET RESULTS:A new website allows you to send yourself or anyone else an e-mail that will arrive in the future. Just be wary of the consequences, writes Karlin Lillington.
IF YOU have dreamt about travelling into the future, visit www.timemachiner.com. Technically you won't, in body and mind, be transported into some future space-time dimension. But you can send yourself (or anyone else) an e-mail in the future.
"Pretty pointless," says Jon Wheatley on (what else?) a YouTube video he made about the website (available at www.youtube.com/watch? v=V-c-Z2Usmuw).
Wheatley recently came up with the idea for TimeMachiner and Paul Fraser did the web development, apparently in just a few hours.
It's a nice, clean little piece of web design and would be very useful for sending yourself reminders - for birthdays, lunch dates and so on. Other sites already offer reminder services and you can easily set up calendar functions to remind yourself of activities or anniversaries on future dates, but so what? This site is simple and fun.
It also - and this kind of freaks me out - allows you to send e-mails every year until 2030. Yikes: 2030! Talk about optimistic. I don't mean optimistic about whether the recipient will still be around, or whether the Earth will still be orbiting the sun. What really boggles the mind is the assumption that anyone would retain the same e-mail address for more than two decades.
On the other hand, I've had my main e-mail address for more than 10 years, so I guess the possibility is there. But, given the amount of spam versus real e-mail that my ancient e-mail address attracts, I shudder to think what my 2030 inbox will look like - even if I can still use my current e-mail address two decades on.
And wouldn't it be creepy to suddenly have your self of two decades ago pop up in your inbox? It's embarrassing enough to read one's old letters or, worse, diaries. But e-mail? You'd probably detest the dweeb you were in your 2008 e-mail, chortling to your future self in a pathetic message filled with smiley-face emoticons and text-speak abbreviations.
Or maybe your 2008 self will sound preening and pretentious, determined as he or she was to impress the future you. "Look, I was clever even then" might be the intention, but those sorts of things tend to bring grimaces to the future you, as anyone who has gone back to read school yearbooks can attest.
Maybe, in a cruel twist, you will attach a photograph of your 2008 self - wrinkle-free, sans comb- over, pre-Botox or whatever the face treatment du jour will be in 2030.
(Let's face it, if two decades ago, someone had told you that in the future people would be queuing to inject botulism into their face, you'd have laughed like a drain, when you should have run off and patented the idea.)
But maybe you won't e-mail yourself. Instead, you might get the mistaken notion that it would be a good idea to confess your unrequited affections for someone a decade or two hence. By then, that person might be your boss or married to your best friend.
Not a good idea, either, to propose marriage by a future e-mail. Or divorce. Or anything dramatic that seems like a good idea now, but where circumstances may have changed spectacularly in years hence, leading to unbearable humiliation.
Though, come to think of it, what's so different about that compared to those e-mails we've all sent too late at night, especially after a drink or two too many, when it really, truly seemed like a good idea to tell this person off, or to let that person know just how much you like them? Who, at least once, hasn't awoken to morning sunlight feeling happy and refreshed, until the dreaded moment of the sudden flashback, when the contents of an e-mail are recalled and, worse, the memory of triumphantly clicking "send"?
On the other hand, imagine terrifying someone by having strange e-mails arrive in their inbox in 2025. What a laugh to remind someone of that undeclared offshore bank account or to send them that surreptitious picture you snapped of them snogging someone at last year's company Christmas party.
Really, the possibilities are endless.
In a recent column I sloppily and incorrectly described a cookie as a "program". A cookie is simply a text file sent by a browser to a server and sent back again to the browser. Information is exchanged between the server and the browser, but cookies do not run executable code.
weblog: www.techno-culture.com
