Copy link Copied Copy link Copied Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Already a subscriber? Login In 1993, after dial-up but before smartphones, the cartoonist Peter Steiner published a drawing in The New Yorker that would come to define the early years of life online. In the picture, a mutt seated in front of computer explains to a terrier: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.
” At the time, I was two years old and blissfully offline, but the image remained relevant when I first logged on 11 years later. The cartoon, I thought, was just a joke about assuming a fake identity, something I did in silly chatrooms all the time. I said I was 25, or French, or a famous novelist, and I carried a little bit of the glamour of my fictions back into my banal life.
Later, I realised that the magic these lies conjured was minor, but it was magic all the same. What was the difference, really, between being treated as a cosmopolitan and becoming one? Maybe the dog impersonating his owner in Steiner’s cartoon eventually forgot he had ever been anything else. Washington Post Copy link Copied Copy link Copied Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.
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