COLUMN: Life in the virtual world

From Seth Lasser's "For Mass Consumption," Fall '96 From Seth Lasser's "For Mass Consumption," Fall '96For the past six weeks, the book at the top of the New York Times bestseller list has been The Road Ahead by redoubtable billionaire Bill Gates. It serves as a channel for Gates to put forth his vision for the future, for the workings of society in the information age. The most intimate changes that we will see in the information age will be new new methods for interacting with other people. Communication via e-mail is but the most basic of ways in which people are already able to exchange ideas and information on the Internet; the future of "virtual reality" will bring even more ways for people to see and even touch each other. There are a number of ways in which interpersonal communication in cyberspace is extremely different than communication in the actual world. The distance between two people who type messages to each other, even when they do so in real time, is great; the person to whom I am "talking" appears only as words on my screen. This distance can easily hide anything about me, although it has not stopped people from using the Internet as a social outlet. Pollsters estimate that 80 percent of Internet users are looking for, in part, "contact?companionship, and community" over the phone lines. As "social animals," people want to meet other people. One way they are finding others with common interests is by subscribing to Usenet newsgroups, from alt.cooking-chat to rec.parks.theme to talk.politics.libertarian. However, the space between Internet users often manifests itself in negative ways on the newsgroups. People often take advantage of the distance and virtual anonymity of the Internet to be impolite and even hostile while online. A newsgroup post intended as a personal attack on another is called a "flame." The most common occurrences of "flames" are when someone voices a controversial opinion, and rational debate seems to disappear in a flurry of assaults and one-upmanship. New users are often flamed for asking basic questions; old-timers often respond with a resounding "Go read a book!" "Flaming" is prevalent enough on University newsgroups like upenn.talk that regulars have taken steps to reduce it -- including the creation of a newsgroup devoted solely to "flaming." One upenn.talk regular recalls that at the beginning of the year, "newbies" were flamed just for being new users. Another devotee explained: "Most newsgroups are cliques with very strict traditions?the violation of the rules by an outsider is considered highly taboo." Futuristic, electronically mediated forms of interpersonal communication will also bring opportunities for the extension of American democracy. More timely and accurate sources of information and the ability to interact directly with office-holders will certainly lead to a better-informed and more active populace -- the crucial factors in bringing more genuine representation to our political landscape. A number of specific ideas for bringing government closer to the citizenry have been suggested; perhaps the most famous was Ross Perot's vaguely defined "electronic town-hall meetings." Any system in which citizens can vote from their homes -- thus allowing more frequent elections and referenda -- is not hard to imagine. Such changes will likely alter the personal nature of American politics, resulting in a more efficient but highly impersonal method of decision-making. Still, this is a small price to pay for a more participatory democracy. The seeds of the information age were planted in the 1960s by the first generation of computer enthusiasts -- "hackers" -- who began to move the computer world away from the centralized mainframe computers then in use. They espoused an unspoken and profoundly countercultural set of tenets like "All information should be free" and "Mistrust authority -- promote decentralization." They firmly believed computers could change lives for the better. Gates and other "hackers" founded many of today's most successful computer corporations, making it easy to see why the The Road Ahead and other predictions for the electronic future exude almost absolute optimism. Perhaps such popularized futurism may be more publicity stunt than accurate prediction of the future. In order to fulfill its promises of bettering the world, global interconnection through ever-spiraling technology requires careful forethought and planning. The impersonality inherent in today's communications systems must be tempered, for without a true sense of human contact, such grand designs will undoubtedly fail.