They Call It Cyberlove : How Can Reality Compete With a Companion That Adores You for Your Mind?

Greetings From Cyberspace!

I fell down the electronic rabbit hole a few months ago when I went to visit my friend Jon. I was worried because I hadn’t seen him for months, and whenever I called he seemed distant and distracted. At first, I thought he was mad at me, but then a mutual friend also expressed concern that he was withdrawing. We speculated that he was having a torrid love affair or an attack of agoraphobia.

But when I got to his house, I discovered that Jon had just moved to cyberspace.

“You’ve got to see my new system,” he said, beckoning me into a dimly lit study dominated by a Macintosh IIvx with a built-in CD-ROM (a souped-up drive that holds staggering amounts of information, like an unabridged Oxford English Dictionary); a high-resolution color monitor, two laser printers, a scanner, a modem, plus more than 100 software programs.

For three hours he demonstrated his new pal’s capabilities. In addition to such prosaic computer tasks as writing or balancing a checkbook, it could play a riff on a snare drum, bark, turn an image into a fresco and lead me on an interactive journey through the Australian Outback. Whenever I introduced a non-technological subject, Jon’s eyes wandered back to the screen. “Let’s go into the living room,” I pleaded. I thought my brain was going to crash from over-stimulation. “Wait,” he said. “I haven’t shown you Morphing.” I politely watched a special-effects program turn a man into a woman and back without surgery.

Jon isn’t the first person to prefer virtual to everyday reality. While there have always been computer addicts, more and more casual users seem to be going off the deep end. Either they’re enticed by the lure of extra power, or multimedia capabilities, or the ability to pick up girls with just a hello and a :-) (that’s bulletin board-ese for a smile). But they find that time off-line just can’t compete.

Take Robin Williams, the Santa Rosa-based author of “Jargon,” an informal guide to computer terms (Peachpit Press). She recently had an intense love affair via electronic mail with a man who lives in Atlanta. “Love in cyberspace is so much deeper,” Williams said. “When you’re writing, you phrase things more beautifully. And you can say things that you never have the opportunity to reveal in person. I was able to go on at length about things that were inside me, without being interrupted.” (As many women know, this is impossible to do with a man in real life.)

The physical bodies in this virtual romance turned out to belong to a 24-year-old guy and a 37-year-old single mother of three. After a passionate weekend, they went their separate ways, two :-)’s that passed on the information superhighway.

I guess it’s only natural that Williams socialized on-line, since like many writers she’s at her keyboard from early morning to the wee hours of the night. Occasionally she gets her realities confused. “Once I woke up in the middle of a dream and thought, ‘Do I save on floppy or hard?’ ” she said. “And I look at cars on the freeway and want to click on them and hit delete.”

Whenever someone annoys me, I create a file with his or her name on it and drag it to my Mac’s trash icon. If I’m really angry, I empty the trash, and whoever was bugging me disappears into the void.”

Perhaps one early warning sign is when you develop a bond with your machine. Granted, it’s hard to resist an intelligent colleague that doesn’t gossip or stab you in the back and makes you look smarter than you really are. “It never lets you down,” Jon marveled. “It’s consistent, it’s reliable, but at the same time unpredictable in terms of wonder and surprise.”

“I threaten to spank mine periodically,” said Heather Sherman, a computer analyst at Caltech, who categorizes her relationship with her machines as “usually antagonistic.” One system’s computers are named after Shakespearean characters (“which is odd at Caltech, since nobody’s heard of them”) and she tends to personalize them. “I’ll say, Juliet was upset because Romeo crashed last night. I came to the conclusion that we should never name computers after tragic figures again. Hamlet was always crashing disk drives.”

Still, it’s one thing to anthropomorphize and another to turn your Amiga into your amigo. “I’ve got the whole interface configured so when I start it up, it says, ‘I’ve been expecting you Mr. Fergerson,’ ” said James Fergerson, an assistant director of institutional research at Hamilton College in New York. “Then at night, there are times when I won’t go to bed unless I’m told. So, I digitized the voice of the doctor from ‘Star Trek.’ She orders me to go to bed.”

If I were a digitized voice, I might order him to get some fresh air. But people don’t nag in cyberspace, which is another big attraction. There is no ageism, sexism, or racism, since all you see are words. It’s also cleaner, safer and more efficient than reality, and above all, you’re in control. Or at least it seems that way.

“Look what I have at my fingertips,” said Jon, who claims to get a thrill akin to an adrenaline rush from the heady sense of power. “I can access a database and retrieve an article in 10 minutes that would have taken an hour to get at the library. And that’s not including the drive there and back or the time I’d spend cajoling surly bureaucrats and waiting in line with a bunch of crazy people.”

I’m not in that big a hurry to ease humans out of my life. But I was intrigued by reports of futuristic communities. As Dr. Joyce Brothers, the psychologist, who recently went on a cyber-business trip, told me, “In small towns there used to be a general store and you’d sit around the potbelly stove and swap tales and gossip and deal with life. Later, the stove became the drugstore. Now it’s the computer network.’

I have no desire to spend one more second staring at my monitor than I already have to. On the other hand, I do have a weakness for anything that simplifies my life. Cyberspace can be remarkably convenient. For instance, to research this article, I used my built-in fax modem to send a message to a service called ProfNet, which connects public information officers on college campuses via the Internet, which links more than a million university and government computers around the globe.

Within 24 hours, the roll of faxed responses stretched from my office to the front door, a distance of some 30 feet. No doubt, I would have received even more input, if I’d had an e-mail address at the time. Folks with electronic mailboxes regard the telephone with disdain, as if it were two tin cans connected by string. (They call real letters “snail mail.”)

“We’ve been trading voice-mail messages,” Dave Farber, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, said reproachfully when I finally managed to connect in real time (what you and I think of as the here and now). “If you had electronic mail, we could have been trading information.”

And the information would always be welcome, since one of the watchwords of this Twilight Zone is asynchronicity. No need to listen anymore; I can communicate whenever I feel like it and you can respond when it feels good for you. “Talking requires both people to be awake,” said Farber.

I don’t think this is asking a lot. Besides, there are nuances that you can pick up in the course of actual conversation that might slip past in an ephemeral note. From talking to Farber, I learned that the Internet has turned the academic world into one big electronic wine-and-cheese party. More than 15 million students, professors and government employees around the world enjoy nearly unlimited access (their respective institutions pick up the tab), so there’s no material incentive for restraint (by contrast, the nearly 5 million consumers who subscribe to national interactive services like Prodigy, GEnie and CompuServe pay a monthly fee and/or an hourly rate).

“I live on the Net,” said Farber, who spends four or five hours a day on-line dealing with students, communicating with colleagues as far away as Japan and throwing out junk mail. “I can’t eat from it, but I can make reservations. I can order supplies. It’s so much easier to deal with someone in Europe who is on the network than someone in the next office who’s not.”

The hallowed halls of academia are being choked by binary ivy. One of the editors of the Software Industry Bulletin, a computer newsletter, estimates that between 30,000 and 40,000 messages are sent daily on the Internet, and these missals will only increase since the Internet is growing at a monthly rate of 15%. Cyberspace is not just some intellectual hangout. The number of American households containing computers with modems has gone from 300,000 in 1982 to more than 12 million today. The growth in commercial on-line services is equally startling. In 1985, CompuServe had 258,000 members, and today there are 1.4 million subscribers. In 1990, Prodigy reported 460,000 members who signed on 47.9 million times per year. In just the first six months of 1993, 2 million addicts have signed on to Prodigy 131.3 million times.

I asked my husband, also on the Net, if he spends a lot of time on-line. He nodded sheepishly. “It’s quite useful,” said Duke, whose cyberspace passport has many visas. “I can send messages instantaneously. I can access the Library of Congress instantaneously. And I can waste a lot of time reading the Oingo Boingo Fan News Group or the I Hate Howard Stern News Group.” These news groups, which remind me of microchip sororities and fraternities, are bulletin boards that enable a Netster to sound off on literally thousands of topics from ‘alt.bald spots’ to ‘alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die.’ Or a bored doctoral candidate can download armpit sound effects and erotic pictures. And you wondered why college tuition is going up?

And what about competing with the Japanese? “When you talk about the decline in American productivity, one factor is that people get lost in cyberspace,” said Stuart Brotman, a communications consultant based in Lexington, Mass. “It’s pretty common in large companies. People feel that it’s their job to initiate and receive electronic messages, but as soon as they do that, they take time away from other things.” He understands the appeal though. “It lets you escape your job without leaving your desk.”

I WAS CERTAIN THAT I’D NEVER BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHOSE FIRST question is “What’s your e-mail code?” But then Jon sent me software to connect my PowerBook to America Online, an electronic information service. It took five minutes to install the software, log on and seal my fate. “Welcome,” said my computer, which up to that moment I didn’t know could talk. “You’ve got mail.” On-screen, a pygmy note popped out of a wee envelope. I felt a thrill, akin to the one I last felt in high school when a girlfriend slipped me a folded message from my latest crush. Jon had sent me a welcome note.

“This is so much better than the damn telephone,” the P.S. read.

“No, it’s not,” I replied. But in a way, it was. I had the possibility of reaching people I couldn’t touch in real life, even President Clinton, whose Internet e-mail address is president@whitehouse. Nobody said, “Can I put you on hold?” or “Excuse me, I’ve got to take this call.” I could also buy airline tickets, check stock quotes, order office supplies and perform a zillion other tasks without seeing the inside of my car (can on-line hairdressers be far off?)

This struck me as a one-way ticket to a life as a shut-in, so I passed. Instead, I double-clicked on the bitsy picture of a woman whispering into a man’s ear. Instantly, I was transported into the Lobby, where modem-mouths can chat in real time. Imagine a party line or a CB radio channel and you’ve got the idea. I stared at my monitor, transfixed, as the text conversations of strangers unfurled. It was like walking into a cosmic cocktail party. Folks from all over the country, with handles like “RedLipstk” and “Wilecoyote,” greeted me by name and sent (hugs) and :* :* (kisses). I couldn’t believe how happy they were to see me. I asked what they liked about cyberspace. “I can have lots of friends who, almost by definition, like me for my mind and wit rather than because I’m rich or good-looking,” “Fearless L” replied.

I was bound to succumb. In cyberspace, unlike Los Angeles, nobody is geographically undesirable or too busy to talk. And people ask questions. I can’t remember the last time I went to a party and had a veritable stranger do more than probe vaguely to ascertain if I could be of any use to them and then walk away.

But the lost art of conversation is thriving on-line. I had lengthy discussions about politics, literature, music and art. Sure, I didn’t know who I was talking to, but the hallmark of this corner of the ‘90s seems to be that you have intimate relationships with folks you’ve never met. (I’ve always been tempted to have a “Come As Your Phone Number” party and invite all my as-yet-unseen phone friends).

Jon was unimpressed with my new discovery. “I use the computer in part to avoid conviviality,” he said. But my husband was delighted. As long as I was contentedly typing away, Duke was free to wander the Net like a hobo roaming the rails. He especially enjoyed monitoring the bulletin-board flame wars, where the level of vitriol shoots through the roof. “A wonderful place to discharge hostility,” Duke said. “No danger of shooting someone or being shot. The worst that happens is someone types in capital letters.” (This indicates shouting.)

Night after night, I popped into the Trivia Room, where games were played in real time. A host would ask tricky questions such as “Where are Panama hats made?” and some 23 contestants would rush to answer. In between questions, the regulars chatted and joked--it was sort of like “Cheers,” everybody knew my name, well, at least my handle. “It’s nice after a hard day to ‘see’ friendly faces and be sorta ‘welcomed home,’ ” said “Koz,” who traded his twice-a-year vacation for a mini vacation on-line four or five nights a week.

As diversions go, it’s relatively cheap ($9.95 a month, with five free hours, then $3.50 an hour). Besides, “I don’t have to pay a sitter. I don’t have to pay a cover charge,” said “MinnieM,” a teacher who found the camaraderie helped her over a messy divorce. “I can sit in a nightshirt with my teeth unbrushed and my hair a mess and have a wonderful time.” She estimated she ran up $2,000 in on-line charges last year playing Trivia. But she got her money’s worth. She recently married “Heifitz,” a fellow Triviot.

Life in cyberspace is not always romantic. One night, on my way to the Trivia Room, a merry bell tinkled and an Instant Message appeared on my screen from a character named “MacDeSade” (not a good sign). “What are you wearing?” he asked. A moment later, the bell tinkled again, and “ThknMeaty” asked for my measurements. I felt like I had wandered into the electronic version of the Tailhook convention. Luckily, creeps are easy to deal with in cyberspace. I clicked my mouse and they vanished in the void.

Not everybody clicks though. Nightly the electrons were jumping in cyber pick-up spots such as the “Romance Connection,” “Guys4Guys,” “Married but Lonely,” “Deep Dark Secret,” and “La Pub.” Some cruisers were looking for love, but others were looking to “go private.” A couple choose a password and check into the electronic version of the Bide-A-Wee Motel, where they have cybersex. I was told this is essentially like phone sex, except that you type. There’s even a protocol for faking orgasm: You type a lot of O’s and AH’s in capital letters. (A San Francisco company has since put out a CD called Cybergasm).

Suddenly, I realized that life in cyberspace was even weirder than life in Venice Beach. “It has somewhat of a black-hole quality,” said Brotman, the communications consultant. “The more you’re into it, the deeper you go. At some point it begins to conflict with real life.” True, I’d been getting worried phone messages from friends and relatives with whom I hadn’t talked in weeks.

I asked Jon what he’d given up. “Let’s put it this way,” he said. “I was seeing this woman and we would get together religiously once a week. She somehow became disenchanted when I failed to call for the month after I got my new Mac. She actually accused me of seeing someone else.”

“When was the last time you left the house?” I wondered. We hadn’t had lunch for months.

“Does taking the trash out count?” he asked.

AFTER A MONTH I DECIDED that I had to escape. I accepted an invitation to visit Caltech, ground zero of the Information Age. It was the first campus I’ve been to where there were no students tossing Frisbees in the quads or couples rolling around in the newly mown grass. Bo Adler, an amazingly bright 23-year-old with otherworldly energy, led me to a computer lab, where guys with complexions the color of acoustical tile gawked at behemoth Hewlett-Packards.

“Here are the people with no lives,” said Bo, who got his first computer when he was 8. I asked him what he found most appealing. “I love information,” he said. “I spend my life trying to find the answers.” Recently he pulled down Hillary Rodham Clinton’s official schedule “because it was there.” But he assured me he could tell when he was on a cyberbender. “It’s when I don’t see the light of day for several days because I stayed in the computer lab until late at night. When I haven’t touched a person for a week and have to ask for a hug so I remember what people feel like.” That was a little scary, but it was nothing compared to what followed.

Bo’s friend Brad Threatt, 22, showed me an interactive game called “Revenge at the End of the Line,” one of many bizarre entertainments that exist on the Internet. In these virtual dungeon-and-dragon-type amusements, players choose a form to inhabit--What’s your pleasure? Troll? Wood Elf? Halfling? Squid?--and have bizarre adventures with other outlandish beings, many of whom are real-life students from around the country who are cutting class to play. (Students of the ‘90s use these games to escape, much like their counterparts in the ‘60s and ‘70s used sex and drugs).

I decided to be an Imp, and Brad logged on. At 11:30 on a Friday morning there were 47 creatures on the line. “Nine are wizards,” said Brad, who would like to be one of these programming black-belts but has yet to contact the Wizard Board of Directors and beg for an internship. Wizards create the space; they also construct the intricate and arcane series of moves and countermoves that define the game. As near as I could tell, my objective was to go on some sort of quest. According to a text description, I, well, the Imp, was in a “lounge filled with easy chairs and lots of couches for weary adventurers such as yourself.”

Brad, who used to play eight hours a day but has since cut back, assured me that this area was safe. “But there are places outside where it’s dangerous,” he said. ‘You’ll need armor and maybe a weapon.”

“Where do I get them?” I wondered.

“At the store,” said Brad, as if it were obvious.

He typed a command and I was transported to a medieval Nordstrom. Let’s see. What should I buy? Leather breastplates? Clog breeches? Scale mail shirts? Moose blood? “They have everything,” Brad assured me.

“I’d like a four-carat emerald,” I typed.

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” he said.

“Huh?” said the powerful computer. (Funny, my husband said the same thing when I asked him.)

I couldn’t take any more so I told Brad to attack the guard in front of the Castle of Doom. “But you’ll be killed,” he said. I insisted. He typed in the attack command, and in an instant the computer announced that the Imp had been stabbed in the head. I didn’t feel a thing. I was already brain-dead from future shock.

Bo walked me to my car. On the way, I showed him my tiny cellular phone. It got him thinking. “Is talking to you on the phone a virtual reality?” he wondered. “And if it’s not, why is talking to you on the computer virtual reality?” I must have looked puzzled because he tried again. “You know humans are just great big walking databases . . . .”

Suddenly, I had an overwhelming desire to walk on the beach and watch the waves and listen to the birds sing. I drove like hell out of cyberspace. When I got home I found a message--a voice message--from Jon.

“Do you want to have lunch?” he asked.