COLUMN ONE : Getting the Message by Computer : New technologies and networks are helping more people to communicate by electronic mail. Speed, directness and a sense of anonymity are attracting home users.

As Alice McLerran’s father lay dying in a Rancho Bernardo retirement home, she was at his bedside--with her laptop computer.

McLerran tapped out a stream of messages on her keyboard, sending updates on her father’s condition to everyone from a sister in Lexington, Mass., to a son in Seattle to a cousin in Dublin, Ohio. Her scattered family shot back words of support.

“I knew that by having the laptop, I could keep everyone close by,” said McLerran, a children’s book author from Minneapolis.

When Americans reach out and touch friends and loved ones, increasingly they are doing it by personal computer. Already widely used in the workplace and in scientific circles, electronic mail and computerized bulletin board networks finally are making inroads into the home and drawing a devoted following.

Urban sprawl, the pressure on two-income families to get more done in less time and the need many people have for more human contact are creating demand for computer communications, proponents say. Shut-ins and lovers have met via their PCs.

Many people find the speed, directness and sense of anonymity of computer messaging liberating, and some of the biggest fans of the technology hope it will inspire a rebirth in the art of correspondence. Social conventions, however, still are being established. Network users sometimes let loose when they dash off a message.

“You can get the same kind of problems you do with any other social interaction,” said Jack M. Nilles, a Brentwood management consultant who specializes in technology issues. “People can be rude, obnoxious and foul.”

The computer networks also offer a way to transmit annoying junk messages and, occasionally, pornography in the form of “digital dirty pictures” to a computer user’s screen. Authorities say criminals have been known to tap obscure computer networks to negotiate drug deals, plot child molestation schemes and distribute stolen credit card numbers and other confidential data.

Before becoming a truly mass medium, computer communications will have to win over far more of the PC-wary American public. By one estimate, 1.7 million U.S. households subscribe to public networks with bulletin boards and electronic mail, or e-mail. That’s more than double the 1987 total, but the number of people who actually send messages from their home PCs every week still is believed to be only in the hundreds of thousands.

People talk with one another by PC in three basic ways:

With e-mail, they can send a private written message directly to one person or to a defined group. Those who receive the note can read it at their convenience.

A related activity, typically known as chatting or conferencing, involves groups of computer users holding “conversations” by sending messages among themselves simultaneously.

Bulletin boards, on the other hand, are forums where comments and questions are posted that anyone else scrolling through the board later can answer--either by posting a reply on the board or by firing an e-mail message back to the original sender.

High-tech hobbyists and others who work on computers at their offices were the first to embrace the technology for the home. With systems becoming easier to use, novices such as McLerran, a self-described “computer illiterate,” are starting to join them.

The handicapped, the elderly, AIDS patients and others with special concerns who crave companionship or a public forum rave about computer messaging. Carol Cunningham, a wheelchair-bound private tutor in Irving, Tex., got her first home computer as a Christmas gift last year, signed up for a network in February and quickly became an enthusiast.

“We can’t always just get out and jump into a car and meet somebody. Yet we can sign onto a computer, and get onto e-mail,” she said. Cunningham, 48, is in a pair of informal computer groups for the disabled that swap information on such things as new shower chairs and hotels with good wheelchair access.

Computer messaging is helping many other ordinary Americans. Traveling salespeople sometimes check on their children back home by computer instead of by telephone. After last year’s big earthquake, PC owners in the Bay Area used e-mail to let their loved ones across the country know that they were OK, using leased transmissions lines spared by the temblor.

Santa Monica residents correspond with city officials via computer about street crime and the homeless on a municipal computer network launched last year.

The computer networks, largely through their bulletin boards on special topics, also are creating “virtual communities” of people interested in such diverse areas as Eastern European politics, model airplanes and science fiction. After last year’s Tian An Men Square massacre, Chinese students around the world looked to bulletin boards to organize protests and compile lists of the dead and missing.

“You see groups of people getting together who never would have before,” Nilles said. Late last year, an Arizona man who had searched for his two sons for 29 years located them by spotting one of their names on the CompuServe network.

E-mail devotees say a big part of the appeal is that people let their hair down when they converse electronically.

McLerran cites the case of her “computer niece,” a close friend she made via computer. In normal social settings, the friend is “painfully, painfully shy.” On the computer, McLerran says, “She’s a social butterfly.”

Loosened inhibitions, however, can lead to trouble. “People who have a lot of pent-up hostility find this is a way to lash out,” said McLerran, citing the overheated computer exchanges known in some circles as “flaming.”

She said she belonged to an e-mail writers group whose computer conferences deteriorated at one point into name-calling and vulgarity. She quit the group after discovering that she “really, really hurt” the feelings of another writer whose work she critiqued.

McLerran said she realized that “if I can’t see their faces and see how they react (to criticism), I might be doing something I shouldn’t fool with.”

Still, enthusiasts say computer linkups are a great way to make friends. Dorothy Fulk, a day care center operator from Apalachin, N.Y., said she started using a computer “chat” line on the Genie network to cope with her loneliness after divorce. Fulk said she likes the way computer communications breaks down social barriers.

“You really communicate with the person,” she said. “You don’t get distracted by how old they are, how fat they are, or whether they’re black or white.”

It also can lead to romance. Fulk met her current husband, Steven, after chatting with him for nearly a year by computer. One of their first exchanges came after Dorothy, then a graduate student, posted an electronic note seeking volunteers to take a coffee marketing survey. Before long, they made a “date” to participate in a computer round-table discussion on space exploration, a mutual interest.

They eventually arranged a face-to-face meeting, and the relationship bloomed. Last month Dorothy gave birth to their first child, a girl, and the Fulks put out their birth announcement over the computer.

It doesn’t always work out that well. The clumsy singles bar pickup line, “Come here often?” has an e-mail equivalent, “I like the way you type.” Also, some users complain about unsolicited electronic advances, including come-ons from men who portray themselves as women, or vice versa.

The rise of computer messaging seems to have caught some experts by surprise. Many of the newcomers to computer communications were brought into the fold by Prodigy, a fast-growing electronic information service owned by International Business Machines and Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Prodigy was unveiled two years ago as an easy-to-use system for casual computer users largely for computerized shopping, banking and investing. But its less-emphasized e-mail service has proven to be unexpectedly popular, particularly among a hard-core group that the company says amounts to about 5% of its subscribers.

When Prodigy announced plans in September to impose new charges next year on its heaviest users of e-mail, angry subscribers fired off thousands of complaints and started boycotting retailers that advertise on the system. “Those who like it, like it a lot, and are very vocal about it,” said Gary Arlen, an information services consultant in Bethesda, Md.

Prodigy said it is adding the e-mail charge to cover its costs. On top of a monthly fee of up to $12.95, Prodigy subscribers eventually will be charged 25 cents a message if they exceed their limit of 30 free messages a month, under the current plan.

CompuServe, at 10 years old the longest-running and biggest of the networks for home computer users, charges most users 21 cents a minute, on top of a monthly fee of $1.50.

In many cases e-mail is cheaper than a long-distance phone call, and that cost advantage may be inherent because e-mail generally takes up less transmission time than voice communications.

Over the short term, the chances of a continued boom in communications via home computer is generally thought to be bright. Arlen estimates that computer networks have signed up little more than one-quarter of the roughly 6.25 million U.S. households that have PCs and modems, the telecommunications devices that let computers talk over the phone. Meanwhile, more people are buying PCs and modems for their homes, even if the trend is much slower than futurists once expected.

Experts differ, however, on how far home linkups will go over the long run. Prodigy has lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and it is not clear whether its competitors are making enough money to stay in the business indefinitely either.

Many of the big companies that operate computer networks--including long-distance telephone giants American Telephone & Telegraph, US Sprint and MCI Communications--are aiming more at business customers than residential users. MCI touted its MCI Mail service in 1983 as “the nation’s next post office,” only to see it take off slowly.

France’s Minitel network, using millions of simple terminals distributed at no charge by a government utility, is considered the most successful electronic information system overseas. But Robert W. Lucky, research chief at AT&T;’s Bell Laboratories, noted that it has relied on subsidies and other types of public support that networks are unlikely to get in this country.

Minitel’s popularity is limited. Among the few big money-makers are its notorious “pink” erotic messages services, which critics say are used by prostitutes and child molesters to make contacts.

Moreover, many Americans are uneasy about working on computers. “Half the people in this country don’t know how to program their VCRs,” Lucky said. “People won’t take to this naturally.”

Even as computers become easier to use, some experts say, the telephone will remain a formidable competitor, particularly as new telephone information services are introduced.

And although an adequate PC and modem now can be bought for well under $1,000, the cost still scares off many consumers.

On top of that, the technology is plagued with unresolved logistic, legal and ethical concerns. Once too many people start using a bulletin board, it tends to get cluttered with junk messages, Lucky said. The issue has fueled debates pitting computer users who support open access to bulletin boards against others who want some editing so they don’t have to waste time wading through irrelevant messages.

Still, enthusiasts predict that the problems will be worked out over time and that the coming years will bring an explosion in computer messaging. They are encouraged by recent negotiations between computer networks to arrange hookups enabling subscribers on different systems to communicate with each other. The lack of hookups between computer networks, experts say, has held back computer messaging much the same way the lack of a unified telephone network hampered the use of the telephone around the turn of the century.

But the biggest thing computer messaging may have going for it is the human need to communicate, a need that the technology fulfills for many people. “When I touch my keyboard,” Lucky said, “I really feel as though I’m in touch with the world.”

COMPUTER NETWORKS

The consumer networks are designed primarily for owners of home computers. Households subscribing: CompuServe: 625,000 Prodigy: 308,000 Genie: 222,000 Quantum*: 145,000 Delphi: 80,000 * Includes the America Online, PC-Link and Q-Link services