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Inphomaniacs
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As electronic communication reaches its awkward adolescence, what are we left with? Is it a place for imaginations to soar without messy, bodily residue--or a place to hole up without human contact? By Christina Waters
It started innocently enough. Like many who've been foraging in cyberspace for more than five years, I was introduced to the power of the Net by my university job. Hardwired into the campus mainframe, I found that I could reach colleagues almost instantaneously via e-mail. Pretty soon, everyone in my neck of the woods was using it-first because it was the hot new thing to do, but more and more because it got results. I began to have more e-mail than voice-mail messages waiting for me each morning when I came to work. And I invariably checked my e-mail first. Hell, I'd even turn on my computer before I took off my coat or turned on the lights.
As a writer and academic, it didn't take me long to get an inkling of the sex appeal of this new medium. I found that I could bypass secretaries and e-mail many executives directly. Surprised by the directness of my inquiry, my subject would invariably respond by e-mail, usually the same day. The hierarchical playing fields guarded by the bureaucratic rank and file were instantly leveled.
It was heady stuff, and I stayed high. Messages and their senders appeared on my screen in a single cluster, allowing me to read them in any sequence. No more listening to each message to get to the one I was really waiting for.
Pretty soon, I was asking for e-mail addresses instead of phone numbers or business cards. Thus armed, I had direct access to key players. People I never could have gotten an appointment with inevitably responded electronically, flattered and disarmed. Some, like Donna Haraway, whose 1985 article "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" helped set the current academic cyber agenda, even explained via e-mail why they didn't have time to e-mail me.
From: "Donna Haraway"
Reply to: RE>Phenomenology of E-mail
Dear Christina,
You got me at a bad time-reading hundreds of email messages, opening piles of snail mail, facing books for courses that aren't in the book store, etc, etc, and the thought of answering even a few questions is awful. Sorry. I use email more and more for work and already miss the more spontaneous way I began using it. It's become another obligation. But still, there are the friendships, jokes, bits of news and bits of good professional stuff, plus all sorts of other goodies. I would miss my email, but why does everything have to become TOO MUCH so fast?
Donna
"I want a new drug," Huey Lewis crooned, and faster than you could type "Eureka," we got one. At this moment, it's estimated that more than 30 million of us are joined in electronic communion-although it's impossible to know for sure. The size of this network is said to be doubling every six months. What began as a high-speed information link now resembles an out-of-control electronic ebola virus-part all-night poker game, part lonely hearts club hustle. The communication mode of choice for science, military researchers and the university community for more than a decade, electronic mail is proliferating as fast as ordinary citizens can hook up modems and join what sci-fi guru William Gibson called "the consensual hallucination" known as cyberspace.
But now that millions have joined this rush, a perhaps inevitable shakedown has begun. Purists are bemoaning the boom, rushing to exit their formerly exclusive domain as they warn of paradise lost. Expressions like "Information Superhighway" and "Cybersex" have infiltrated everyday language even though most people don't have a clue what they mean. The Garden of Eden has been invaded; everybody wants to get stoned.
The pioneers feel crowded-they don't like the lean and hungry look of those staking claims in the chatty clubs called newsgroups, which are organized around pursuits from genealogy to science fiction. They worry that the stampede threatens to drown out the pioneer communities of thinkers, talkers and midnight hackers. Their restlessness may be justified. Just a few weeks ago, the National Science Foundation began divesting itself of several decades of Internet caretaking. The Net is moving toward privatization-and perhaps a future as a giant interactive commercial.
Caught in this chaos of hype, veterans and virgins alike are asking big questions. What is electronic reality anyway? Is cyberspace the great new town hall-a corner bar or quilting bee for the '90s? A democratic public space in which all may participate, regardless of appearance, creed or sexual preference? Or simply a privileged frontier on which most range riders are white, university trained, baby-boomer professionals? Is it a place for imaginations to soar without messy, bodily residue-or a place to hole up without human contact?
One thing is for sure; the computer screen preserves anonymity and hides a multitude of sins. This buffer is part of e-mail's allure. Your physical self is hidden; you can truly be all that you can be. Safe in the privacy of your own surroundings, you can add a little spin to your electronic self, made bold by the security of facelessness. This accounts for the often innuendo-laden sexiness of online chat.
With the possible exception of e-mail messages posted on news groups-where the only real requirement is that you fork over a modicum of information and not waste anyone's time with stupid questions-most cyber communication thrives on linguistic finesse. Paramount is the ability to convey a sense of personality using only words and punctuation. The hunt belongs to those with well-developed language skills.
While misunderstanding is a constant doppelgnger of text-only encounters, the upside, Mark Dery writes in a South Atlantic Review article entitled "Flame Wars," is a "technologically enabled, postmulticultural vision of identity disengaged from gender, ethnicity and other problematic constructions. Online, users can float free of biological and sociocultural determinants."
Onscreen, I see only words-words shaping ideas, giving attitudes, offering insight. Onscreen, I don't see gender, class, age or race. For the able-bodied and socially privileged, it may be impossible to appreciate the transcendence of disability or economic standing that computer-mediated communication allows. It's a two-way street. I can be having a bad hair day or still be in my bathrobe and be communicating with some high-powered, Saab-driving, GQ cover guy. Or my boss, or his CEO. No matter how clutzy, or physically limited, we can all be Astaire and Rogers on a keyboard.
On the other hand, "vacationing in the datascape" just might be a misguided attempt to avoid the hard questions of the material world, film theorist Vivian Sobchack observes in Artforum. It's possible to make a case for not really encountering anyone else at all in cyberspace, merely the reflection of our own words on a screen. The average hacker is high on this safe substitute for life's messy realities, Sobchack contends, and this ambivalent desire to be powerful...
Songs of Innocence
For me, it was the ability to conjure old relationships, new flirtations and a world of information that kept me high and online. Understanding my own attraction and addiction helped me understand those of other people. As a so-called "knowledge worker"-one of the editors, writers, librarians and educators that author Howard Rheingold identifies as the second wave of e-mail users-I've found e-mail such an aid to interviews and research-gathering that I can't imagine surviving without it. Once I discover the major writers in a field, instead of rushing out to the library to check out their books, I locate their e-mail addresses and boldly query them via electronic cold calls. Almost every interview conducted for this article, and much of the research, was done electronically, in a fraction of the time it would have taken to make phone calls and engage in face-to-face interviews. Instead of my taped or hand-written notes, I've got their responses, word for word, unambiguously stored for future cutting and pasting. There was a willingness on the part of informants to dive into a cyber encounter, a willingness missing from real-life encounters-especially in a world hungry for community and increasingly distrustful of others.
Jumping into one newsgroup-a cyber "mailbox" where multiple dispatches can be "posted" and
simultaneously downloaded-to find out about bed and breakfasts in France, I began to learn how to trust certain responses, to interpret the value and reliability of information I was being given. In turn, I learned that in this multi-user type of e-mail, the name of the game was to be direct-a cut-to-the-chase sort of discourse.
E-mail is easily my main method of keeping in touch. It includes monthly poems and radio scripts sent to me from a filmmaker friend in Washington, D.C. I make plans to visit shows in The City with my old friend Bob, with whom I've been chatting online for six years. I got juicy gossip about the Oscars from a friend who attended. I take great delight in contacting friends I haven't seen for years by looking up their e-mail addresses in university phone books. Getting train schedules from London to Nottingham from my friend in England, tips about restaurants from a software designer I met at lunch, having students hand in assignments by e-mail, even discovering that the organic farmer who doesn't have a phone does have an America Online address.
"You can't simply pick up a phone and ask to be connected with someone who wants to talk about Islamic art or California wine, or someone with a 3-year-old daughter or a 40-year-old Hudson," explains Rheingold, author of an excellent guide to electronic networking, Virtual Community. "You can, however, join a computer conference on any of those topics, then open a public or private correspondence with the previously unknown people you find there."
Armchair travelers can ask questions about restaurants in Tuscany or critique the latest episode of "Star Trek," compare carburetors or rave on about the joys of sadomasochism.
"Every day, there's a handful of postings that sparkle, like gemstones," enthuses Reva Basch, who hosts a conference called Women On the WELL, one of hundreds of subject-specific conversations on the electronic salon founded by the folks who first brought us the Whole Earth Catalog. "WOW has given me a precious gift," Basch writes in the Austin-based zine Fringeware, "the opportunity to meet and connect with other women-strong, stubborn, talented and accomplished, questing, perhaps needy, but always remarkable-in a way that I could not have imagined, 10 short/long years ago.
"There's an evolutionary aspect to living in cyberspace. Your monitor is no longer a flat, impermeable surface. It acquires depth, like Alice's mirror in Through the Looking Glass. It becomes an infinite space in which all that information, and all those other beings, reside. You come to regard modemless computers as poor, mute, stunted things, robbed of their full cybernetic birthright."
KPIX reporter Tony Russomanno agrees, albeit with reservations.
I've been online daily since 1985, when I became a sysop [systems operator] on CompuServe's Journalism Forum. I had some online experience in the mid-'70s with Plato and the Plato Users Group. It was just a sleepy little hobby until Al Gore kicked the switchboard operators out of the White House basement and began trumpeting the information superhighway.
I go out of my way to limit e-mail sent to me, otherwise every PR person in the country would be spamming me with useless press releases. Unsolicited e-mail is usually not answered. I'm more likely to send and receive mail on topic-specific message boards. For example, I'm using the UK Forum on CompuServe to get information on David Letterman's upcoming trip to London.
The night of the Oklahoma City bombing, I used the Web to follow coverage by the University of Oklahoma's online student newspaper. They were updating information every couple of minutes, and some of it was not available on the national wires.
Yes, I do have a saturation point. Yesterday, I put a chair out by the pool with a good book, an adult beverage and a nice jazz CD, but somehow I felt compelled to hole up in my office for a few minutes to download the newest version of Netscape's Web browser.
I am an online addict, and as soon as I find a 12-step program online, I intend to do something about it.
Tony
Transcending The Meat
Electronic communication is seductive in many ways, but two particularly potent aspects keep turning up-as a metaphysical transformation of self and as a multi-
dimensional social experiment.
"Disembodiment has its own allure," writes Tiffany Lee Brown, an editor of Fringeware. "Transcending the meat has become a common goal in many religions, philosophies, paths of knowledge and discipline. The loftiness of living in the mind, surpassing the base needs of the flesh, attracts more than just ascetics, Christians and logicians ... in this age of alienation and visceral paranoia, regular ol' white trash Americanoids like myself can drop happily into the sucking vacuum of mediated communication, Alices in a never-ending rabbit hole."
Kate Bornstein, author of Gender Outlaw, is a former man who knows about "transcending the meat" from another angle. In the fleshpots of cyberspace, Bornstein finds a strong and exciting analogy to her own transsexuality. "Cyberspace frees us up from the restrictions placed on identity by our bodies," she says in an April 1995 interview in the magazine Mondo 2000. "It allows us to explore more kinds of relationships. I can go online as anything. I go online as various kinds of women. I've gone online as a guy a couple of times; I'm playing a stable boy in a vampire scenario now."
Some cybernauts, on the other hand, would rather play with the stable boy-albeit virtually. Thanks to the real-time erotozone known as Internet Relay Chats, participants can jump into the electronic hot tub with total strangers, asking questions, and getting answers as fast as they can type. "Sometimes I just want a sexy conversation with someone," writes publisher Scotty Brookie in a recent editorial in Lavender Reader, a Santa Cruz-based gay and lesbian periodical. "I think talking about sex is exciting, even if the words are coming from thousands of miles away and appearing on my monitor. Some people say this is weird. I say, I have a nice conversation with someone, it's completely safe, and I still get my whole bed to myself when we're done talking."
Not only is cyberspace a haven of the safest sex, it's also a safe house for queer confessions and coming out-a network of alternative empowerment. Among Brookie's online companions is a 17-year-old Slovenian who can't talk about his gayness to anyone in his hometown-but can to his electronic pen pal in California. Another lives in Los Angeles and is only out of the closet on the Net. Still another communicates from Singapore, overjoyed to discuss gay issues without fear.
"I've talked to gay guys in their 60s and gay guys who were 14. I've talked to lots and lots of men whose race, age and appearance I know nothing about. I've had discussions in five different (if halting) languages. And almost always, I leave the conversations marveling at our common humanity, excited about being able to travel the world and learn about other cultures every day, without being on vacation, and be out the whole time."
Love at First Byte
Others have gotten their feet wet in cyber-romance, only to fall head over heels in love with a virtual partner. Joy Williams, a graphic designer who now lives in Scotts Valley, met her husband, a California clergyman in her faith, when she e-mailed him a self-penned spiritual essay from her Washington, D.C., home.
I did so, with a little note in German (because I had heard that he had been a German language teacher) at first to catch his interest, which it did :-).
Tom read Joy's essay and then called her.
We ended up talking for about three hours. The next day I had a little e-mail note from him at my terminal, and for about two weeks we sent these back and forth, learning about each other through e-mail, and through calling each other as well. We were flirting and about two weeks of this went by, and one day we were talking and Tom said 'You know, I think I love you.' And I dumbstruckedly realized that I loved him too. Or at least was pretty sure that I did. The next day there was this wonderful 'e-mail bouquet' at my terminal, a very poetic and passionate love letter (he really writes incredible poetry), and I sent him one back.
Only after they'd fallen in love and agreed to marry did Tom and Joy actually meet in three-dimensional space. No, they didn't look exactly as they'd described to each other. "But neither one of us were displeased either," Joy recalls. "We were just different from the mental images we had created." And so they were married last year.
Was this sort of courtship romantic? Wasn't it risky?
Both. Exhilaratingly so. That is what added to the whole magic. This uncertainty. There is an element of risk on the Internet, but that is what makes it that much sweeter when it DOES work out. It helped, of course, that our mutual friend cared about us both, and was able to reassure both of us about the other one. I think that it was possible that we might not have had the intensity of our relationship, the romance, if we had just met face-to-face first. I got to know Tom's heart, and his mind, before the visual and chemical factors came into play. And he got to know mine.
Of course, the very factors that encourage romance and fantasy can also breed emotional blindness. Face-to-face meetings between cyberpals can serve as an abrupt reality check. Eric Thiese, a San Francisco-based electronic educator and host of an Internet conference on the WELL, recalls an encounter "where the person misrepresented-no, out and out lied-about most things."
It was after a painful breakup of a love affair, and I was vulnerable. And I met someone in online chatting. We had a lot of things in common, a surprising amount, and even though she didn't live here I'd been thinking about getting out of town.
So on a trip back East, he made a detour just to meet his new cyber friend. The shock is still evident.
She was not physically how she'd described herself, and more importantly her situation, involving an abusive husband, was definitely not over. I just wasn't in a position to go through this again.
Thiese, in retrospect, chalks up his chilling reality check up to the limitations of text.
"We are more equal on the Net because we can either ignore or create the body that appears in cyberspace," cyber philosopher Michael Heim writes in his article "The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace" in Cyberspace: First Steps. "But, in another sense, the quality of the human encounter narrows. The secondary or stand-in body reveals only as much of ourselves as we mentally wish to reveal. Bodily contact becomes optional; you need never stand face-to-face with other members of the virtual community." Although some brave souls like Joy Williams risk it and get lucky.
Cyberescapism
On the far side of electronic obsession are those whose entire cyber reality is a fiction-the Multiple-User Dungeon or MUD players. Ultra-elite, most by invitation only, MUDs are real-time fantasy worlds evolved from the Dungeons and Dragons genre of role-playing games. Gamesters construct their cyberworld's every detail, designing communities of the imagination-worlds elegantly free from poverty, ignorance, diversity and anybody not like us.
"It's very welcoming, very empowering, but the trick is making it a tool, not a home," says Scott Noam Cook, an associate professor of philosophy at San Jose State University who's currently engaged in a two-year study of experimental, interactive cyber-environments.
Cook is wary of the panacea-like claims being made for electronic culture and he worries that we're deifying the tools and the people who use them. "Technology can't create communities," he says. "We can use technology to create communities." But Cook insists on a caveat. Unlike real communities, electronic ones are self-selected, and, hence, users construct a public electronic space of others like themselves-a human tendency Cook calls digital eugenics.
"If it's town squares we're creating on the Web," Cook cautions, "they look a lot like Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1938."
So Is the Honeymoon Over?
The flip side of these ethnically cleansed CyBerlins are the growing ghettoes of cyber groupies clogging the Net. In a 1993 position paper for Xerox PARC, Palo-Alto-based MUD guru Pavel Curtis notes that bulletin boards and newsgroups "have the problem (and virtue, perhaps) that access is unlimited. From the perspective of a serious practitioner in some field, this communication channel is very 'noisy.' ... The general level of discourse is thus driven toward the middle ground, the knowledgeable hobbyists."
For many people's money, the Sausalito-based WELL had the best stuff. Started ten years ago by Whole Earth Catalog stalwarts who wanted to keep in touch though their families and careers had separated them physically, the WELL has been an elite subscription address for pure conversation and the fostering of a vibrant cyber community of some 10,000 culturati. Then, last year, the WELL was purchased by an entrepreneur with visions of expanding it into a for-profit metropolis for a million prospective clients. In the wake of this development, a handful of the old guard like Howard Rheingold started planning a new, small, user-owned online salon called the River. Even if no one will come right out and say that the WELL had become polluted, it was clear that its high-minded waters had been diluted by newcomers.
"When a conference gets very large, communicating takes a long time," River pioneer Roger Karraker admits. The River hopes to recapture some of the intellect-intensive flavor of the WELL's heyday, he says. Still, he believes that the River's existence won't necessarily mean an exodus from the WELL. "In the real world, you can't live in two worlds," he says. "But you can electronically - you don't have to choose." Karraker believes that having a monthly fee for membership will separate out those "serious about conversation" from mere browsers. "Any service that charges a fee can in a sense self-select its population."
That's similar to the position that cyber-patriarch Rheingold maintains on the new community.
One of several things many of us have learned over the years is that governance flows from control, and control flows from ownership. The River is owned by the people who create the value that customers pay for, and the owners are also the customers. It's an experiment in democracy that we couldn't *not* do."
Cyber cowgirl Erika Whiteway, co-editor of Fringeware's "Chicks in Cyberspace" issue, believes that serious conversation on the Net is being watered down by what she calls "the America Online mentality"-people who want to surf through topics because they can, not because they have anything to contribute.
I used to think the Net was going to be the hope of politics/race/gender and provide a better reality even if it is virtual. Like all the other simple problems and solutions, the money guys and politicians have gotten their fat fingers in it and Doomsday is at hand again ... whoever owns access to or provides information is master of us all. My computer used to be my pal, then I was its hostage; now it is like a vacuum cleaner, something I hate but need to use ...
This is what has killed the WELL-I'm sorry, but the WELL really did have "it" for a number of years: wit, sarcasm, burning brains; but as with all things American, the bottom line rose up and ate the top-feeders ... makes me want to head out to the country and get back to what's real and important-the smell of clean air, the feel of a horse, the grass in spring.
Songs of Experience
Like a reformed junkie confessing at a 12-step meeting, Clifford Stoll now bemoans the amount of time he spent detached from the sensuous thicket of real life. Stoll has been online longer than most of us and he wants out. In his heavily publicized new tome, Silicon Snake Oil, Stoll unleashes a steady stream of reactionary invective against his former online obsession. Not only does he believe that little of the information gleaned from electronic pub-crawls is genuinely useful, but he now finds that computer networks "isolate us from one another and cheapen the meaning of actual experience. They work against literacy and creativity. They will undercut our schools and libraries." Stoll even wonders whether our networked world isn't "a misuse of technology that encourages passive rather than active participation." Famed for recounting his discovery of a German spy ring operating on the Internet in his bestseller The Cuckoo's Egg, Stoll admits that all his years of e-mailing, data-gathering and keeping in touch with friends was "fun and challenging." But now he's recanting.
"Oh, Stoll's mad all right," said longtime buddy John Perry Barlow, pioneer cyber cowboy, Grateful Dead lyricist and co-founder of the information watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation. "He's mad as hell and determined to outdo his outrageous self."
But even Barlow is publicly airing second thoughts about the joys of inphomania.
The secret of e-mail is, sadly, that it's safe. I hope for a day when more people can feel safe while looking into one another's eyes and not merely while typing at each other.
On the other hand, that safety has been a godsend for the shy and disenfranchised, those whom Barlow calls "the Eleanor Rigby's of the world." Barlow leapt into the WELL about seven years ago, with its rich soup of conferences in politics, parenting, philosophy and popular culture. And while he had a hell of a time e-mailing a worldwide virtual community, his personal romance with the medium has cooled. What's missing from cyberspace for Barlow is "the dense mesh of invisible life," he writes in the Utne Reader. "It is at the heart of the fundamental and profound difference between information and experience." And as far as his social needs are concerned, Barlow has opted for experience.
So what are we left with as electronic communication reaches its awkward adolescence? Is this techno-tool a means of exercising passions and interests and a shuttlecraft to new town halls? Or a form of withdrawal, denial and obsessive narcissism? And do we really need to trivialize this brave new world as a Manichean either/or struggle? Like every new world, it mirrors the strengths and weaknesses of its colonizers. It contains what we want it to. Everything, that is, except nuance, diversity and eye contact.
Morning in Cyberia
Intrigued by John Perry Barlow's recent article in Utne Reader, I send him an e-mail invitation to join me for lunch after his recent keynote address to a world conference on e-mail. Barlow takes a pot shot at the WELL when he writes that "the almost universal failure of the intentional communities of the '60s and '70s was a lack of diversity in their members." As was often the case with participation in the communes of this era, Barlow sees us dabbling in online communities, but then pulling out whenever we get bored. But planned communities make for homogenized worlds. In his e-mail response, Barlow taunts:
You've got to admit it *is* awfully white and male in here.
Over lunch a few weeks later, Barlow reiterates that his enthusiasm for virtuality has cooled. Used wisely, he thinks, it's a terrific addition to real life. Dabbing his beard to remove traces of cocktail sauce, flirting shamelessly, Barlow reminds me that we never would have enjoyed lunch together had our association remained only electronic. We grin over the last bite of dessert, and take last sips of coffee.
"Meat's messy," Barlow says, eyes twinkling, dimples blazing. "I like messy." And I get his drift.
Nonetheless, we both rush back to our computers later that afternoon. Thank God, there is e-mail waiting. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||