By Heather Dugmore
'I'm a simple kinda gal... I like Pina Coladas and getting caught in the rain."
Karma is 22 and looking for love on the Net. Her tender years might surprise some of her respondents because her reference - a line from The Pina Colada Song - predates her birth by four years.
Fortunately, love in the information age (or post-information age, as it's also called), transcends time and space.
One little dial-up gets you into Google - the largest search engine in the world - hooking you up with Karma and millions of other potential soul mates via LoveAtLast.com or any one of thousands of virtual dating sites.
From dating to digital determinism, the past 10 years have launched anyone with internet access into an era of instant electronic communication that did not exist in 1995. Back then it was virtually impossible to download a photo of Karma.
"Cruising with your 28.8K modem, you would first have to decode the photo," explains Laurie Fialkov, Cape Town-based founding director of Cybersmart.co.za - one of the frontrunners in South Africa's internet service provider (ISP) industry (there are now over 600).
"Unless you were a computer geek or cyberporn geek, downloading photos was no point-and-click matter.
"As students 10 years ago we would try to access images from porn newsgroups. The photos were encoded with hashes and numbers, so you didn't know what you were getting. As heterosexual males, we'd hope like hell it wasn't a man or something more scary."
The porn industry was a driving force in the development of the internet and remains so with some of the most advanced technologies around. Porn sites never go down and their tracking software is unsurpassable. One visit to a porn site and they're onto you.
From porn to progress, today you can download any number of photos from the widest variety of sites. Not only can you see what Karma looks like on the net, you can interact with her and she can sing The Pina Colada Song to prospective dates: "If you like Pina Coladas / And getting caught in the rain / If you're not into yoga / If you have half a brain / If you'd like making love at midnight / In the dunes on the Cape / Then I'm the love that you've looked for / Write to me and escape."
Escape is the name of the post information age. On the net you can make love at midnight or leave your virtual lover. It's all happened so fast. Try to remember a time without e-mail or the internet. It seems so very long ago.
"I remember getting my first e-mail address at university in 1991," Fialkov recalls. "E-mail was a mission. Messages involved a complex sequence of escape and control characters."
When the world wide web was introduced into universities in 1993, the geeks were beside themselves. Now you could click with the mouse and the document would appear - no more sequences of keys to remember.
The speed of technology advancements surprised everyone, even Bill Gates. In 1981 he said: "Nobody will ever need more than 640 kilobytes of RAM." Entry-level PCs now come with 256 megabytes or 262 144kb of RAM.
"Today's computers are about 32 times faster than 10 years ago. An equivalent improvement in the car industry would mean that a car bought in 1995 with a top speed of 200km/h could now travel at 6 400km/h," says Fialkov.
Many say we can safely predict that computers will be 32 times faster in 10 years' time.
Predicting the digital future is a tricky business. Futurist Nicholas Negroponte has spent years "inventing the future" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ten years ago, in his book Being Digital, Negroponte commented: "The machines we use will fundamentally change to respond to individual needs. Intelligence, personality, interactivity and sensory richness will all progress in great digital leaps."
Reg Lascaris, worldwide development director for advertising agency TBWAHuntLascaris, takes up Negroponte's point: "Looking back 10 years, before the advent of the cellphone and the internet, we were a mass-medium society with TV, radio and mass print media dominating the media scene. This has changed dramatically and media is becoming acutely niched the more global we get."
The internet has delivered unprecedented choice into the hands of the individual. For the cost of an online subscription you can instantly access the news and newspapers we prefer from all over the world.
Blogging or "citizen journalism" is additionally taking the internet by storm, allowing you and me to publish our own personalised online versions of life and the news at minimal cost and with minimal technical knowledge.
The speed and impact of the internet is more revolutionary than the introduction of the electric telegraph in the 1860s, which delivered "instant" updates on the American Civil War.
Instant has become increasingly more instant. "We all waited for the real-time countdown on the Michael Jackson verdict. I got it on my cellphone," comments Lascaris.
With every scandal or disaster - from the death of Princess Diana in 1997 to last year's Boxing Day tsunami - the online news audience grows.
A few years back there was some speculation that the print media would die a death by dial-up. Like the dotcom boom of the late 1990s and its subsequent crash in 2000/2001, what was anticipated is not what happened.
"People will always want something physical to hold," Lascaris says. Just as Karma is seeking a flesh and blood soul mate, human beings, even those with the most advanced electronic access, enjoy the tangible comfort of books, newspapers and magazines.
Instant electronic news has certainly affected the format of the print media, which now provides in-depth coverage, unexpected angles and the human intrigue behind global headline dramas.
We love reading about other humans and now we can read more about them than ever before. At the same time, more is known about each and every one of us than ever before as marketers gain access to the inside track of our lives.
"Niche advertising and intensely personalised direct marketing will increasingly target individuals through the internet and the cellphone; not just SMS messages or banner adverts, but fully fledged interactive adverts with video streaming through wireless technology," Lascaris says.
When cheaper broadband becomes available on a wider scale, marketers expect a second, enduring internet boom. "The first dotcom boom was premature and the real marketing spend on the internet is only happening now and will accelerate over the next 10 years.
"What you like, don't like, what you do for leisure, where you live, what you do, where you shop, what you earn, how you spend it ... will determine precisely what media and message is sent to you."
Once the cellphone, TV, radio and computer merge, with interconnectivity between all the communication media, individual likes and dislikes can be closely monitored with tracking software.
The right to privacy assumes an entirely different form in the electronic era and legislation is battling to keep up with the speed of technological advancements. The faster it gets, the more paranoid we get. Can malicious parties intercept our internet communications? Yes they can, says Fialkov, but not to the extent we fear.
"Malicious parties can intercept the data stream but if the data is encrypted, it is highly improbable they will crack the code. You also don't have to be a big corporate to encrypt your communication. Anyone can download free encryption software from the net."
There are many ways to protect yourself. Fialkov warns against installing unsolicited screensavers or other software, even from a friend.
"A malicious party could sent it via your friend's e-mail. In the process of installing the screensaver, your user name and password is picked up by the malicious party, delivering full access to your life."
Oh my God, where will it all lead, my head is too full, I need to escape, you might well be wailing. You are not alone. Information overload is triggering the worldwide yoga, fishing, golfing, country-living boom in a bid to balance the scales.
An increasing number of people are seeking to temper their pace of life by relocating to rural areas (facilitated by electronic access). The urge to contain time is directly reflected in the upturn in sales of traditional, hand-crafted analogue wristwatches.
"For R3,99 on a Sunday morning at the flea market you can purchase perfect time. By comparison, good old-fashioned watches lose a minute or two each month but make up for it by offering a more gracious, measured pace," comments Johannesburg-based wristwatch connoisseur Peter Machlup, who sells the world's finest wristwatches, including Patek Philippe, Rolex and A Lange & Sohne.
"To wear a quality watch and feel its weight; to know it is carved out of blocks of steel, not squeezed out of plastic, is deeply reassuring."
Reassurance is something we can't get enough of in the information age. Connecting with the rest of the world is one thing, but it does not replace the reassurance we derive from being connected with ourselves.
"The faster life gets, the more we need to step aside and get in touch with ourselves," says Durban-based astrologer Barbara Leiman.
"It makes sense that we are obsessed with machines and electronics right now because this form of connectivity is the entry level to understanding true connectivity, which lies in the development of our intuitive and energetic powers.
"Likewise, the real information age is the Aquarian Age - the age of enlightenment and awareness, which we are currently entering, and which is defined by truthfulness and love."
This brings me back to Karma. By now she might have found true love - as did the woman in The Pina Colada Song.
Songwriter Rupert Holmes explains: "The man who answers the personal ad discovers it was placed by his wife.
They are both a little shocked that they were actively investigating relationships outside their marriage. Happily, their indiscretions led them to each other."
The details of this song came true for a real-life couple in Jordan who met and fell in love online, using pseudonyms. When they finally met in real life and realised they'd been unfaithful to each other, they ended their relationship, face to face.
Face-to-face confrontation and communication is becoming increasingly rare. Millions of people (not just teenagers) now conduct entire relationships on the internet or by SMS.
Which leads me to the final, most critical point. Wherever the post-information age leads us and no matter how fast and obtuse life might get, let us agree on one golden, eternal rule: never to end any relationship by SMS.