1996: “Cyberspace” is not yet a household word but is about to get a big boost in the public consciousness with an international, one-day event, 24 Hours in Cyberspace.

Top editors, photographers, computer programmers and designers, contributing from all over the world, collaborated to document a single day on the internet. It became not only a digital time capsule but a coming-out party, of sorts, for a medium whose impact was as dramatic in its day as television was a half century earlier.

24 Hours in Cyberspace was the inspiration of photographer Rick Smolan, who created the “Day in the Life” photo-essay series. Smolan used the same formula as “Day in the Life,” recruiting 150 photojournalists to go out and chronicle a slice of everyday life, in this case as it pertained to the then-counterculturish phenomenon of the web.

The technology of the internet was not the subject: Smolan wanted (and got) pictures of how different people in different cultures were using the internet, and the effect that the medium of cyberspace was having on their lives.

The resulting work was edited and then displayed on a website. It also appeared as the cover story of that week’s edition of U.S. News and World Report and, soon thereafter, as a coffee-table book.

Vice President Al Gore, already a vocal defender of the environment, wrote the forward. His wife, Tipper, was one of the photographers.

The project, billed as the “largest one-day online event,” cost around $5 million and was bankrolled by companies — like Sun Microsystems and Adobe — with a vested interest in the internet’s growth, as well as by individual contributors.

As it turned out, Feb. 8, 1996, fell on the very day that President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act (later overturned in court). Many activists turned their websites black that day, a protest mentioned briefly on the 24 Hours website and in the book.

Source: Various

Photo: Project head Rick Smolan sits in the San Francisco control center created for 24 Hours in Cyberspace.
Nikitin/AP

This article first appeared on Wired.com Feb. 8, 2008.

See Also:

• March 17, 1948: William Gibson, Father of Cyberspace
• Tron's Triumphant Return to Cyberspace
• Cyber Command: We Don't Wanna Defend the Internet (We Just Might Have To)
• Jan. 5, 1996: Introducing the Cellphone Bomb
• Feb. 10, 1996: Checkmate
• Feb. 10, 1996: The Machines' Takeover Begins
• April 3, 1996: Unabomber Nabbed in His Montana Hideout
• April 14, 1996: JenniCam Starts Lifecasting
• July 23, 1996: Stand By … High Definition TV Is on the Air
• Oct. 2, 1996: FOIA Law Ushers in Digital Democracy
• Nov. 19, 1996: Canadian Bridge Crosses 8 Miles of Icy Ocean
• Dec. 4, 1996: GM Delivers EV1 Electric Car
• Dec. 14, 1996: Big Holiday Bonus Shows Workers the Money
• Dec. 20, 1996: Science Loses Its Most Visible Public Champion
• Feb. 8, 1865: Mendel Reads Paper Founding Genetics
• Feb. 8, 1924: A New Way to Die