Reach Out and Access Someone<\/p>\n
(This article is reprinted from the September 6, 1983, issue of ‘The Village
\nVoice’ and was written by Teresa Carpenter.)<\/p>\n
Las Vegas in the rain is about as cheerful as Guam. So last November when the
\nstorms that swamped Malibu swept inland to pound the roof and glass siding of
\nthe Hacienda Hotel, I spent a lot of time curled up under the covers
\ncontemplating the Future.<\/p>\n
The Future seemed a pressing issue just then because I was nominally covering
\nCOMDEX, a biannual convention where makers of computer hardware and software
\nunveil their new lines in an atmosphere of matter-of-fact futurism. The truth
\nof the matter was that I was a bewildered observer tagging along behind my
\nspouse equivalent, Steven, who writes a column for ‘Popular Computing’, belongs
\nto a little cadre of technology writers who cover these events with the espirit
\nof prospectors in a new gold rush.<\/p>\n
One afternoon early in the convention week we went to lunch with another
\ntechnology writer from ‘Time’ magazine. The two were swapping industry gossip
\nwhen Steven stopped, turned to me, and said, not unkindly, “You can add
\nsomething if you like.” That made me so uncomfortable that I didn’t return to
\nthe convention. I strode off as if I had some pressing business to conduct,
\nplayed the slots a while, and ended up back at my room burrowed under the
\ncovers to contemplate my place in this new order.<\/p>\n
The technological cleft that had been opening between Steven and me went back to
\nthe previous year when we had both gotten Apples for word processing. Buying
\nthe computers was originally my idea. Once we got them home, we both learned
\nword processing. I learned it faster. But I stopped there, while Steven’s
\nfascination with the technology impelled him to go further. He fussed with the
\ncomputer as if it were a beloved toy. He talked to people, read about
\ncomputers, wrote about them, and quietly became a lay expert.<\/p>\n
My ignorance was most conspicuous in an area called “telecommunications” – that
\nis, using the computer to reach and talk to other people. It had not occurred
\nto me that I might ever want to do that until in perusing the small library in
\nSteven’s suitcase I came across ‘The Network Nation’, written by a pair of
\nsocial theoreticians named Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff. The book,
\npublished in 1978, slightly preceded popular interest in computer technology and
\ndidn’t receive much attention. Yet it contained a fascinating vision. In it
\nhome computers are as common as the telephone. They link person to person,
\nshrinking, as the authors put it, “time and distance barriers among people, and
\nbetween people and information, to near zero.” In its simplest terms, ‘The
\nNetwork Nation’ is a place where thoughts are exchanged easily and
\ndemocratically, and intellect affords one more personal power than a pleasing
\nappearance does. Minorities and women compete on equal terms with white males,
\nand the elderly and handicapped are released from the confines of their
\ninfirmities to skim the electronic terrain as swiftly as anyone else. What the
\nNetwork Nation promises is so sensible and humane that it leaves one embarrassed
\nto be living among contemporaries who take meetings.<\/p>\n
\u001a\u001aHiltz and Turoff tended to speak of this society as if it were already a
\nreality. And it is true that over the past five years hundreds of networks have
\nspring up pocked by subcultures. There are massive governmental webs to
\naccommodate the needs of military analysts and artificial intelligence experts.
\nThere are commercial networks like the Source and Compuserve, which sell canned
\ninformation and let users talk to one another. There are research and
\ndevelopment networks, which study the way users talk to one another. At the
\nmost rudimentary level there are hundreds of electronic bulletin boards run by
\namateur astronomers, gardeners, computer enthusiasts, and Marxists – anyone with
\na home computer, one inexpensive piece of software, and a “modem.”<\/p>\n
The modem, I knew, was critical to the enterprise. It dials up what is known as
\na digital network to put your computer online, in contact with a “host”, a large
\ncomputer called a mainframe. As modems are fairly expensive, we got one Hayes
\nmicromodem – a black box about five inches long – which we agreed to share.
\nFrom the beginning, however, it had been clear that Steven was Keeper of the
\nFire. Having exhibited more initiative, he had laid claim to it. And during
\nthe months after Las Vegas, as I expressed oblique curiosity in the modem, he
\nprotected his prerogatives. He needed it for work.<\/p>\n
I should explain that at any time I could have announced I needed the modem and
\ngotten it. But I didn’t. This passivity was less a result of the
\ninaccessibility of that black box than my suspicion of it. That I would have to
\nlearn how it worked was inevitable, but to say “I’ll do it today” meant
\nadmitting that some familiar things were on their way to oblivion. By midsummer
\nI was still at a standoff with the technology in my own home. The modem was not
\ngoing to make the first move. I decided that to deal with it, I would have to
\nwhip up some artificial urgency – by writing about it. When I told Steven I
\nwould be needing the modem for work, it sounded so reasonable that he just
\nshrugged and said, “Sure, call Art Kleiner in the morning.”<\/p>\n
Art Kleiner is editor of ‘CoEvolution Quarterly’. More recently he was
\nrecruited to help edit ‘The Whole Earth Software Catalog’, Stewart Brand’s
\nnewest New Age venture. I had found him, on the couple of occasions we had met,
\nan uncommonly gentle apostle of the New Technology. Long before it was
\nfashionable, he wrote articles explaining networking to ordinary people. He
\nseemed a little more realistic than most of the gold rush writers, actually
\nadmitting the possibility that all of this enthusiasm about telecommunications
\nmight be hype.<\/p>\n
He was, however, personally passionate about it. As a student at Berkeley in
\nthe late ’70s, he had been mightily impressed by the work of Murray Turoff, who
\nwas operating, under the auspices of the New Jersey Institute of Technology in
\nNewark, a network called the Electronic Information Exchange System. It was
\nknown to its afficianados as EIES (pronounced “eyes”). Art went on a pilgrimage
\nto the East Coast to meet Turoff, who gave him a trial account on the system.
\nArt spent so much time there that he was made a “user consultant” charged with
\nguiding writers onto EIES.<\/p>\n
When I called Art in San Francisco in the middle of July to tell him I wanted an
\naccount on EIES, he uttered a beatific sigh. He would send an electronic
\nmessage, a sort of letter of introduction, to Turoff. There would be three or
\nfour days’ wait until I received an account number and password. I would be
\nbilled $75 a month plus connect time that runs between $3 and $8 an hour.<\/p>\n
During that waiting period, I began to play around on other systems. Steven had
\nto make another trip to California, and this time left me not only the modem but
\nhis password on Compuserve and a set of cursory instructions. One evening, I
\nsettled in front of the terminal to make my first solo excursion into the
\nmystic. I took a floppy disk containing a piece of software called “Z-term,”
\nslid it into the slot of disk drive A, and closed the door. The computer hummed
\nand the screen suddenly came alive with glowing green letters. I typed “ZPRO”
\nto ready the modem to dial. Typed out the number of Telenet. Within the modem
\na tiny red light began twinkling to dial the network.<\/p>\n
The terrain at the border of Compuserve was more familiar to me than I expected.
\nI spotted, with relief, the “menu,” which displays a set of choices. I had used
\nit on earlier occasions when, after Steven had signed on, I would try to pull up
\ninformation. Never with very much success. The information services, for all
\ntheir taunted diversity, seemed to me cluttered with novelties like biorhythms
\nand airplane schedules. Steven professed to have run across one pocket of
\nesoterica which provided the floor plans of Czechoslovakian hospitals. The only
\nconsistently useful data seems to exist for businessmen. Compuserve, which has
\nabout 69,000 subscribers, recently conducted a user survey. More than 96 per
\ncent of those queried were men, 50 per cent of whom have household incomes of
\nmore than $30,000 a year. This is a comparatively privileged world.<\/p>\n
From the menu I selected “Home Services” and entered its number, “1,” after the
\nwaiting prompt, an exclamation point that means the computer and its formidable
\nresources await your command.<\/p>\n
Pressing the return button pulled up a more specific menu, which included news,
\nweather, sports and – “COMMUNICATIONS.” Entering its number at the prompt, I got
\nthe communications menu, which included “electronic mail.” In this heavily
\ntrafficked feature, users send what resemble teletyped messages to one another’s
\nelectronic mail boxes. More intriguing, however, was option two, the “CB
\nSIMULATION.”<\/p>\n
The simulator is, as the name suggests, a “citizen’s band” on which users across
\nAmerica and Canada communicate in rapid one-liners fired in succession. The
\nCBers use handles – Loo Loo and Gandalf and Super Scooper. This sprawling
\ndiscourse is conducted with the abandon that anonymity affords. And late at
\nnight these elfish identities convene to chat and play mind games. This
\ngenerally occurs on Channel 1 – reserved for “adult conversations.”<\/p>\n
I signed on as “Sapphire.” The name had no particular significance, but it
\napparently telegraphed something provocative for I was beggared by overtures.
\nOne of these came from Lucky Lori. After the initial stir of a new persona on-
\nline had died down, she asked if I wanted to join her in private conversation by
\nentering the “\/talk” mode. Lori, who I believe mistakenly took “Sapphire” to be
\na variant of “Sappho,” was bisexual. After cordial preliminaries, during which
\nshe confessed to being a little high, she asked if I had ever heard of
\n“Compusex.” I hadn’t. How is it different from an obscene phone call, I asked.
\n“More fantasy,” Lori said. But you’re missing sound, I noted. “Written word is
\nbetter,” she replied. I signed off on Lori but the following day fidgeted in the
\nfull regret that follows any adventure one declines out of cowardice. A couple
\nof nights later I got on the board looking for Lori but was promptly hit on by
\nthe Deadwood Kid, who lured me into the private mode. Deadwood was a
\nblue-collar worker (he said) and a sweet guy. When he asked if I knew about
\nCompusex, he was so unassuming, I asked him to go on.<\/p>\n
Compusex did not unfold quite the same as an obscene phone call, although I
\nimagine it could have. Deadwood, it turned out, was a sensitive scenarist who
\ntransported us to his living room in Northern California where we danced a while
\nto Barry Manilow before easing in step toward his bedroom.<\/p>\n
It is worth noting that nothing, least of all a seduction, proceeds inexorably
\nin this medium. Although the CB operates in real time, there is always a couple
\nof seconds delay between responses, which meant that at one point while
\nensconced in an imaginary bed we both claimed to be on top. The encounter was
\nfurthermore plagued by technical interruptions, not the least of which was an
\nincoming telephone call which knocked me off-line.<\/p>\n
The encounter was pretty arousing. Amazing when you consider that it was devoid
\nof sound, touch, and expression. This strange game illustrated how intimate the
\nexpression of disembodied essences can be.
\n\u001a\u001a
\nThe elves who disport themselves on the channels have created an entire society
\non-line. “CBland,” it is explained somewhere on the system, “is a town, a club,
\na clique, a fantasy world, a dating service…or anything one wants it to be.”
\nWhat Compuserve and the Source apparently didn’t realize when they first put
\ntogether their potpourri of consumer goods is that people are not crying for
\nairline schedules and biorhythms or even stock quotations, but to talk to one
\nanother. The one truly revolutionary thing that telecommunication offers is the
\nability to transform time and space between human voices. The possibilities for
\ntwisting the boundaries of conventional communication became clearer when I
\nfinally got on to EIES.<\/p>\n
It seemed eerily silent by contrast. Stepping through the menus of the
\ncommercial services is like strolling anonymously through a Turkish bazaar.
\nLogging on to EIES, however, was like having crossed the threshold of a
\nmonastery where monks, consecrated to the cause of research and development,
\nglide along the corridors out of reach of the novitiate.<\/p>\n
There are about 1200 inhabitants in this little world. It is a neutral host to
\ngroups of scientists, peace activists, executives, philosophers, and others.
\nAlvin Toffler and former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson are among the
\nnotables who have tuned in from time to time to observe various scenarios of
\nfuture communication unfold under the ubiquitous guidance of Murray Turoff.<\/p>\n
Turoff is known as “the father of computerized conferencing” for an idea that
\ngrew out of work he did in the early ’70s for the Nixon administration. He was
\nan apolitical eccentric who, after receiving a doctorate in physics from
\nBrandeis University, had been recruited by a private think tank called the
\nInstitute for Defense Analysis to design systems for playing war games by
\ncomputer. Turoff later went to a new operations research group of the Office of
\nEmergency Preparedness. In his free time there he designged an unauthorized
\nconferencing system. His superiors, when they discovered the experiment,
\nthreatened to sue him for misuse of government property, but scaled down the
\npunishment to confiscating his terminal. Turoff regained his terminal and the
\nupper hand when the administration asked him to dust off his system to implement
\nthe Wage-Price-Freeze Guidelines of 1971.<\/p>\n
During the mid-’70s, when he was teaching computer science at the New Jersey
\nInstitute of Technology in Newark, he received a grant from the National
\nScience Foundation to create an ideal system – one that offers three basic
\n“modes of interfacing,” or communicating.
\n\u001a\u001a
\nThe simplest to imagine is “electronic mail.” It is like sending a teletype
\nmessage. After composing a message in a “scratchpad,” you assign it the user
\nnumber of the party to whom it is to be sent, then dispatch it with a keystroke.
\nThe other two formats represent a more radical departure from the conventional
\ncommunications. “The notebook” is a workspace where people who are
\ngeographically scattered can co-author or edit manuscripts. Further out on the
\nfringe is “the conference,” where people can convene and make decisions without
\noccupying the same space or even the same period of time.<\/p>\n
I had learned about these things from ‘The Network Nation’; using them was quite
\nanother matter. Though I had applied myself diligently to the users’ looseleaf
\nmanual sent me by the EIES office in Newark, it was dense with lists of
\ncommands. So arcane is this system, I learned, that *nobody* knows all of the
\ncommands on EIES. I surmised that rather than proceeding logically, I would be
\nbetter off just slopping around on the system and working backward from my
\nmistakes to some guiding principles.<\/p>\n
In fumbling about the keyboard trying to compose a plea to Art for help, I
\naccidentally – and quite inexplicably – opened a conference with myself as
\nmoderator. Sort of like ‘WarGames.’ *More* disturbing was that my wailing
\nmissive – “I am running into brick walls. Cannot seem to contact another human
\nintelligence” – was posted prominently there as the first entry. This left me
\nanxious thereafter that my messages might misfire, landing in the box of a
\nmeditating monk.<\/p>\n
A few days later, when I was composing in note, another novitiate crash-landed a
\none-liner into my scratchpad, “I’m just getting used to this thing! Where are
\nyou?”<\/p>\n
Struggling to respond, I discovered the command “???”. I replied, “Lost in
\nspace and time.”<\/p>\n
His name was Lee Rhodes and he was production manager for personal computers at
\nHewlett-Packard’s plant in Silicon Valley. He was in charge, he said, of
\nconverting the plant to Japanese manufacturing and was on-line to discuss it
\nwith other executives. It was comforting to discover that Lee, who had actually
\ndesigned computers, was also having trouble getting the hang of things. But he
\nwas adventuresome and asked if I had used the “link” command. The “link,” as it
\nsuggests, allows two people to converse in one-line thoughts. It is slow going
\non EIES – about a 10- to 30-second lag between entries – but is very popular
\namong new users. The monks, I am told, sniff at newcomers who use a lot of
\nlinks. First of all, crashing in on someone’s screen with a link could disturb
\ntheir work. More important, however, it represents a shallow attachment to
\nreal-time communication. The sincere telecommunicator will be weaned within a
\ncouple of weeks from dependence upon real time and begin to explore other modes,
\nwhere conversation takes place “asynchronously.”<\/p>\n
Over the next three weeks, Lee and I moved to a notebook, an abstract domain
\nthat took on the properties of a physical location. We were rarely on-line at
\nthe same time. Whenever he was on, he would post an entry; whenever I was on, I
\nwould post a reply. I learned from this asynchronous exchange that he was
\nentertaining guests from Europe, had two cats, and had been divorced for four
\nyears. Although he claimed to be maladroit as a writer, he was remarkably
\nskillful at compensating for the lack of visual and verbal cues. On the CB I
\nhad noticed the elves have developed a clumsy shorthand for the missing cues,
\ntyping “(Blush)” or “(Grin)”. These became annoying because they gave the
\nexhange the quality of comic book dialogue. Lee, however, was careful to
\narticulate what pleased or had offended him, the essence of good on-line
\netiquette.<\/p>\n
The notebook had an unusual effect on time. The conversation took place over
\ndays and weeks, acquiring a longer rhythm than face-to-face encounters. An
\nentry conveyed more ideas than a spoken utterance. It resembled letter-writing
\nin this way. But the colloquy was more urgent and continuous than a conventional
\ncorrespondence. This asynchronous rhythm becomes even stranger when more than
\ntwo people are involved, as they are in the scores of conferences being
\nconducted at any time on EIES.<\/p>\n
\u001a\u001aMy earlier impression of silence was dispelled once I got within earshot of the
\nmonks clustered and conferring in the alcoves. Some of these gatherings were
\npublic and welcomed anyone. There was the EIES Poetry Corner, where users could
\nsign in and leave an opus generally signed with a pen name. There were the EIES
\nNews Service and a spot for film critique called the Critics Corner. It was
\nmoderated by a 13-year-old boy who shared an account with his father, a
\ncommodities trader.<\/p>\n
Art invited me into two of his own conferences, one for eliciting reviews for
\n‘The Whole Earth Software Catalog.’ I posted a critique of a program written by
\na California proctologist for reading Tarot. The other was a private conference
\nfor magazine writers where the discussion always seemed to return to writing
\nabout technology.<\/p>\n
Art once remarked to me, “Studying EIES is like listening to the users of the
\nfirst telephone talk about the telephone.” Conversations are often
\nself-conscious, probably because users are aware of being part of an
\nexperiment. On the one hand the novelty spawns an unnatural enthusiasm. In
\ntrying to overcome the coldness of the medium, some personalities appear manic.
\nOn the other hand the prospect of shooting a message into the void is so awesome
\nthat it can inhibit spontaneity.<\/p>\n
I was nervous at first about the prospect of having my own fumbling observed by
\nsome unseen presence. This fear of being watched is fairly common, according to
\nTuroff and Hiltz. They call it the “fishbowl effect.” For that reason they
\ntell a new user, as a matter of policy, the types of information that are being
\nkept for research purposes. Since EIES exists for the purpose of studying the
\ncommunication that goes on within its veins, the inner group counts for each
\nuser, the total number of sign-ons, messages sent, and conferences “accessed.”
\nThey do not, they say, keep records of those to whom the messages are sent or
\nwhat conferences are accessed. There is a running transcript of virtually all
\nof one’s exchanges kept within the host computer. You must simply trust that it
\nwill not be read by the programmers.<\/p>\n
Beyond anxiety about privacy, the pioneers chatting on EIES are also often
\npuzzled by the strangeness of the new medium. Conferencing, particularly,
\nrequires a new way of thinking. Its languorous rhythm means that you can not
\ncome on the system at any point and command the entire scope of events. Turoff
\nand Hiltz have likened this limitation to looking through a peephole into a
\ngiant ballroom: vision is circumscribed by the aperture. One way of surveying
\nthe terrain is to read all the conference entries from beginning to end, but
\nthese sometimes run into hundreds. The better moderators will write summaries
\nof the proceedings at intervals. A newcomer reading the entries sequentially
\nmay also become frustrated trying to find a line of discussion. Ideas do not
\nbuild in a linear fashion. Since no one has to speak in turn, conferees may sign
\non and add a reply to a comment that was entered two weeks and ten comments
\nearlier. That lots of little conversations are going on within the bigger one
\nmeans you must learn to read them stereoptically.
\n\u001a\u001a
\nThe fact that it is never anyone’s “turn” to speak creates a sort of populist
\nchaos. This is, on the one hand, very democratic. “Typical face-to-face
\nmeetings,” explains Elaine Kerr, a sociologist who is head of the EIES user
\nconsultants, “are dominated by men, by people who speak the loudest, by people
\nwith the highest hierarchical positions. But the computer meeting gives women,
\nand minorities, [those] who are not appropriate to the culture, the opportunity
\nto voice their opinion.”<\/p>\n
EIES recently conducted an experiment where it set 24 groups on-line to work on
\na problem – what items does one need to survive in the Arctic? “Right” answers
\nwere provided by Mounties and Eskimos. The EIES groups with more women did
\nbetter than those dominated numerically by men. “Now why were they better
\ndecisions, we really don’t know,” says Roxanne Hiltz. “Maybe more of the women
\nwere Girl Scouts.” What the study revealed, however, is that conferencing
\nleaves women and minorities freer to voice their opinions, and the more
\ninformation that gets out, the quantifiably better the decisions to follow.<\/p>\n
The potential for telecommunications to blast away social barriers and to get
\ninformation circulating among minorities and women has been explored on a small
\nscale by groups like Community Memory, a group of Berkeley leftists who during
\nthe early ’70s placed terminals in public places. That experiment languished
\nwhen the equipment kept breaking down. They are trying to get it going again
\nand there are presently several pilot projects underway to promote the peace
\nmovement, but these are hampered by the fact that not all of the people who need
\nto belong on that network have computers.<\/p>\n
What was also apparent to me from reading the entries in a couple of social
\njustice conferences on-line is that they tend to generate rhetoric that meanders
\naimlessly in this fluid environment. Those who seem able to direct computer
\nconferencing most effectively are those who go in for strong leadership. This
\nis the province of industrialists, about 200 of whom I found on EIES. There are
\nexecutives of major American corporations who have been on-line since April to
\nmake recommendations to the White House Conference on Productivity to be held in
\nWashington in September. One of them, a Xerox vice-president named Paul
\nStrassmann, was reputed to conduct a mean conference. He agreed to let me look
\nin as long as I agreed not to publish any of the content. (I had been assured
\nprivately that the transcripts of those discussions, which dealt with measuring
\nthe productivity of information workers, contained no secrets that might topple
\nthe Republic.)<\/p>\n
Strassmann, whom I imagined to resemble Jason Robards, did not allow his
\nconference to turn into, as he described it, “one grand electronic bull
\nsession.” His conferees, who all went through a training session in Houston,
\nwere asked to add only “issues” or “recommendations.” If someone came up with a
\nparticularly good idea, he or she would be appointed an “Issues Manager” charged
\nwith whipping that idea up into a recommendation. Strassmann himself processed
\nand edited those ideas into “Gutenbergian form,” a xeroxed report that will be
\npresented to the White House Conference.<\/p>\n
When I asked the moderator if he found conferencing satisfactory, he replied:
\n“I was able to take your message, disassemble it electronically into the Q&A
\nformat and get it back to you in about 20 minutes. In contents, format and
\nsubstance it surely beats anything else we could have done.”<\/p>\n
\u001a\u001aI messaged Paul – on-line one tends to use first names or nicknames, which
\ncreates an illusory intimacy – to tell him that while, yes, we had handled our
\ninterview with dispatch, I sort of missed the old face-to-face approach where a
\nreporter could seize upon an interesting point and probe. I had already
\nlearned how hard it was to lob hardballs on-line from a little experiment I was
\nconducting on the side.<\/p>\n
I had decided to conduct interviews in my own misconceived conference. I
\ninvited Art Kleiner, then Roxanne Hiltz, Elaine Kerr, Murray Turoff, and others
\nto answer questions. There were 11 queries dealing with privacy and the quality
\nof life on-line. Since asking them one by one and waiting for responses could
\nhave taken weeks, I posted them all at once. As a result my sources fluttered
\nin graciously, like tropical fish nibbling at this or that question, ignoring
\nthe unpleasant ones. After about ten days, my conference was dead. I was not
\nas quipped as a captain of industry for the rigors of moderating. There are just
\nsome things you have to ask in person.<\/p>\n
Art Kleiner offered me his guest quarters, a living room in his San Francisco
\napartment. The room, nearly empty except for a pile of quilts and a cot, is a
\nspartan outpost of the Network Nation. Art is not much into creature comforts.
\nIn one corner of the room, however, was a workspace handsomely appointed with a
\nKayPro computer, which serves as a nexus of his tasks on EIES and ‘The Whole
\nEarth Software Catalog.’<\/p>\n
Having been separated from my own computer during a three-day business trip
\nacross country, I knew I would have messages waiting. And seeing the KayPro, I
\nfelt an instant urge to log on. Art mused that this was the behavior of a
\n“communications junkie,” one who comes to depend upon the thrill of finding
\nresponse on-line. Art said he knew all about that.<\/p>\n
“I was the perfect addict,” he said referring to a period in 1979 when, briefly
\nout of work, he first found EIES. “I had lots of free time. I was breaking up
\nwith the woman I cared most about. I logged in to escape…and EIES was the
\nonly place that really accepted me at that time.”<\/p>\n
Art came to think of EIES, he explained, as a “dreamworld,” where one with
\nintellect and an antic nature could command a following. “People liked reading
\nwhat I wrote,” he said. In person Art has the studied demeanor of an ascetic.
\nOn-line, however, I had found him a much more flamboyant character, zinging
\nmessages full of energy and wry abuse. That pleased him. “Writing well on EIES
\nis like being good looking. This system is for writers. It’s like being
\ncaptain of the football team.”
\n\u001a\u001a
\nArt’s virtuosity sails at full tilt in a conference called the Soap Opera. This
\nis where the monks of EIES, including the eminent Murray Turoff, go to play. In
\na make-believe village called Disbelief they spin an ongoing yarn, trying on
\npersonae like costumes. Steven, I learned, has been cavorting since January as
\n“Scoop Frothmouth,” ace reporter for the ‘Disbelief Bugle.’ Art has played as
\nmany as 20 characters of both genders at one time, but appears most frequently
\nas Starving Artist. Starv has for three years been carrying on a fantasy affair
\nwith a beautiful and willful vamp named Wistful. Her anima is Elaine Kerr, the
\non-line sociologist who began consulting for EIES from Columbus, Ohio.<\/p>\n
“I got to know Elaine pretty early on,” Art explains. “She is charismatic
\non-line. Very dynamic. A petulant and intense character. And very
\nself-indulgent, which I always find charming in women.”<\/p>\n
Art and Elaine have never met, although each sought out the other’s published
\npicture. Last spring Starv took Wistful on a mythical trip to the Caribbean
\nwhere he made love to her in the sand. It was a strange gesture born of events
\nin the real world. “I was overworked and almost desperate at the time,” Elaine
\nexplains. “So he wrote it in for me. Roxanne understood my delight and the
\ntrue nature of this gift, which I can’t begin to convey in a message.”<\/p>\n
Elaine recently moved to New Jersey to be physically closer to EIES. When I
\nreturned from California, I sent Murray an electronic message suggesting that
\nhe, Roxanne, Elaine, Scoop, and I all go to dinner. They suggested a French
\nrestaurant in Westfield. Steven confessed to me sometime before we caught the
\ntrain that Scoop had once tried to seduce Wistful. This little revelation was
\nmade with impunity since I, having cuckolded him on Compuserve, was in no
\nposition to reproach.<\/p>\n
Elaine Kerr was a short dark woman. She was quiet at first, aware perhaps that
\nwe all were familiar with the exploits of the vamp Wistful. But she became
\nwarmer, ebullient in fact, as dinner and two bottles of wine brought everyone’s
\nfibrillated personae into alignment. Roxanne, who wore an embroidered Victorian
\nshawl and a gladiola blossom tucked into her dark hair, talked rapidly and
\nintelligently, sometimes affectionately mocking Murray Turoff, the visionary.<\/p>\n
“Murray Turoff says,” she says, “when you build a computer system, you’re
\nbuilding a social system. Your own social world. It operates the way you like
\nsocial worlds to work. And he loves building these social worlds and making
\nthem…watching them work.”<\/p>\n
Turoff the Visionary, who sits beside her, is an affable, bearish man wearing a
\nplaid coat. He had endured himself to me with a message sent some days
\nearlier. “I am by nature a slow reflective thinker…” he wrote. “Therefore I
\nassume in face-to-face groups an air of contemplative wisdom to disguise my slow
\nwit. On-line, of course, I have no such problem since instant response is not
\nrequired. You might say I created this medium to satisfy my own needs.”<\/p>\n
“She’s not kidding,” Murray intones to the gathering around the table. “…I’m
\ndesigning a human social system.”<\/p>\n
“You could design a dictatorship as well,” interjects Elaine.
\n\u001a\u001a”I’d love to do it,” Murray muses in the abstract. “All I need is the right
\ncompany. Some companies operate under a feudal system. If I was doing a
\ndictatorship, first of all, you couldn’t send a message> to anyone unless I
\nfirst approved the message. Okay? If we had voting, I’d get 10 votes to your
\none. And I would have access to your files. Now you can imagine that I could
\nsee that to some managers.”<\/p>\n
“We presented this to one very large corporation,” Roxanne continues. “The
\nDictator Design, tongue in cheek. And they said, ‘That sounds wonderful. We’ll
\ntake it.’ And on the other hand, when I gave them the results of [the
\nexperiments] which showed them that this medium freed women to make equal
\ncontributions, they said, ‘We don’t want that.'”<\/p>\n
I was incredulous. “Sure,” Murray replied. To Murray the construction of
\nworlds is an intriguing game. He regards the alternatives with dispassionate
\ncuriosity. Roxanne is the social conscience of the two. Unlike Murray, she
\nbelieves that the behavior of people determines the design of social systems.
\nThe Network Nation, he explains, should not be a sprawling, comprehensive,
\nhomogenous system. Rather, it should be a collection of hundreds or thousands
\nof smaller systems, “intentional communities” for purposes as varied as
\npolitical debate and a big game of bridge. Keep things small so they can be
\ncontrolled by the groups that operate them. People should be able to design the
\nway they want to live and also stand guard over their own data bases.<\/p>\n
“I think we both believe,” she says, “that the most desirable communities for
\ntelecommunications are like electronic small towns. They number in the
\nthousands, not in the tens of thousands. What happens on something like EIES
\nwith only 1200 people total is that everyone can know someone or know of someone
\nwho knows them. There are only three programmers. Those three could get [into
\nfiles] but they have ties with a lot of users. The community ties are such that
\n[there are] social pressures to treat each other with dignity. It works.”<\/p>\n
What if the CIA came around asking for a private message?<\/p>\n
“There will be a fire,” says Roxanne resolutely. “There will be a fire.”<\/p>\n
When the first bottle of wine came, I proposed a toast to the Network Nation.
\nThat was a presumptuous thing to do. I really didn’t have the credentials, but
\non the tide of such heady debate, one feels expansive. One feels exclusive. One
\ncertainly feels relieved not to be caught without a modem on the cusp of a new
\nage. In the end, it could all come to nothing, but who wants to be left on the
\noutside?<\/p>\n
“To the Network Nation,” I said and everyone clinked glasses. “May it grow,
\nprosper, and remain democratic,” Roxanne replied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reach Out and Access Someone (This article is reprinted from the September 6, 1983, issue of ‘The Village Voice’ and was written by Teresa Carpenter.) Las Vegas in the rain is about as cheerful as Guam. So last November when the storms that swamped Malibu swept inland to pound the roof and glass siding of the Hacienda Hotel, I spent a lot of time curled up under the covers contemplating the Future. The Future seemed a pressing issue just then because I was nominally covering COMDEX, a biannual convention where makers of computer hardware and software unveil their new lines in an atmosphere of matter-of-fact futurism. The truth of the matter was that I was a bewildered observer tagging along behind my spouse equivalent, Steven, who writes a column for ‘Popular Computing’, belongs to a little cadre of technology writers who cover these events with the espirit of prospectors in a new gold rush. One afternoon early in the convention week we went to lunch with another technology writer from ‘Time’ magazine. The two were swapping industry gossip when Steven stopped, turned to me, and said, not unkindly, “You can add something if you like.” That made me so uncomfortable […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[480,2363,2042,2362],"class_list":["post-17846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-arcana","tag-compuserve","tag-computer-arcana","tag-digital-archaeology","tag-retrocomputing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}