Life Needs Internet (installation)

Life Needs Internet is a project that collects handwritten letters to document digital culture.
It consists of a online platform and this video-installation.

The video-installation shows eight handwritten letters from people all over the world. Each letters describes how the Internet has influenced the author's daily life. The letters are written by people from the jungle of West-Papua to cities like Singapore or Amsterdam. Together the eight letters portray the evolution of our global digitalization and it's impact on different cultures. Ranging from 0% influence of the Internet to 100%.


“I don’t know what internet is”
Isajk, Obolma, West-Papua.

“Someone who doesn’t use a computer is missing out in life”
Lily Rumba, Darjeeling, India

“Digital information has made ‘modern man’ suffer from digital incontinence”
Roos van Geffen, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The project was initiated in 2010 when Jeroen van Loon started his research by traveling to areas representing the extreme opposites of our possibility to access internet. Varying from a village in West Papua, where nobody had heard of the concept internet to the bustling metropolis of Singapore, where internet controls society. Here and everything in between he interviewed people he met on his travels. He asked each person to hand write a letter describing the influence of access to internet on his or her daily life. By looking at our digital world through the traditional technique of handwritten letters, we discover original and personal stories which portray our global digitalization.