COVER STORY : CyberVal : A writer overcomes the fear of a new PC with a little help from young experts.
Not long ago I became part of a trend, both nationally and here in the Valley. Like the other Americans who bought 50 million personal computers last year alone, I bought a new PC--a better, faster, more powerful model than the Stone Age IBM clone my son took off to college eight years ago. This is the story of the first weeks of the bittersweet romance between me and my new IBM compatible.
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I have a standard answer for friends who ask what kind of computer I bought. “It’s beige,” I tell them. Because I knew from the outset that I didn’t want to devote the rest of my adult life to figuring out how much electronic firepower I needed, I turned the task over to my 24-year-old son, Eric.
Computer-literate (computer-gifted, if you ask his mother), Eric made lists of possible options and checked them twice. He tapped his more expert pals for advice, then worked the phones to compare prices. Finally, he asked an especially knowledgeable friend, Mark Bentkower, if he would join us, and we made an appointment at a computer store known for customizing PCs at a competitive price.
At the store Eric and Mark did most of the talking. They had strong views on such things as how fast the modem should be. They spoke of the rate in bits per second and baud. Baud? I’m a recovering English major. When I hear baud, I think of the Wife of Bath, Moll Flanders, those bawds. Actually, I too know that baud rate indicates how quickly your computer sends or receives information. As such, it has a major impact on how much you enjoy your system. Too slow a modem will drive you crazy and will ultimately cost you a fortune in phone charges (since the modem is the part of the system that allows you to connect with other computers and exchange information over phone lines). The higher your baud, the better.
From Day One, I had decided to have the kind of relationship with my computer I have with my Honda. What matters to me is that it works, not how it works. I don’t want be a computer doctor when I grow up. But not everybody feels that way about their machine helpers. Earlier this year, at a conference on women and the Internet at the Huntington in San Marino, I ran into the aptly named Rhonda Super. A North Hollywood resident, Super, 42, works in the entertainment industry and dreams of the day when she will configure the elements she has so carefully researched into the computer of her dreams. “I love hardware,” says Super. “I like making quilts, and I think it’s the same concept. You construct something.”
I don’t make quilts, but I did write the check after the Biederman deal was struck.
To be really accurate, I would describe my new computer as ecru.
Getting Started, or Is There Anything on TV?
If you are like most people, which is to say, if technology doesn’t make you tingle, the first thing that happens when you get a new computer is that you are afraid of it. Not the way you’re afraid of getting carjacked or losing the game of life, but the way you’re afraid of having to program your VCR in a timed test. You’re intimidated. This happens to virtually everyone. Actor John Goodman was brave enough to screech at Elizabeth Taylor in “The Flintstones” movie, but he recently revealed on a TV talk show that he had just bought a new computer and--these are his exact words--”I’m scared to death of it.”
There’s a reason for this. Computer culture isn’t nearly as amicable as terms such as user-friendly would lead you to believe. Cyberculture has a we’re-hip-and-you’re-not aspect to it that can put off all but the most confident. For example, take the Internet (please). Finding your way onto the Internet may be the single hardest thing you will ever have to do (see accompanying story). Even the guides to the Internet seem to be written in secret code.
Part of the reason the Internet is harder to join than an Afrikaner country club is that nobody who is already on the Internet really wants to help you over the Great Technodivide to their side, where the cool people pass electronic notes at the speed of light. And once you do manage to get connected, “newbies,” as Internet plebes are called, are often treated to cyberscorn, especially if they came aboard via a commercial access provider.
So what’s gonna happen is one day, soon after you unpack your new computer, you’re going to sit down in front of your monitor, hands hovering Van Cliburn-like over the keyboard, focusing all your mental energy on whatever computing task lies before you, and you’re going to decide: To hell with it. I wonder if anything good’s on cable?
One evening recently, I was making up excuses for not practicing on the computer when my son finally got impatient.
“Come on, Mom,” he said.
“Carpe datum.”
Those Pesky Gender Differences
Computers were invented mostly by men, mostly with other men in mind. Want evidence? Read any history of computing or, alternatively, look where the ads for computers run in your daily newspaper. The Saturday sports section, that’s where. Want more? What does 90% of the world’s software consist of? Games. Games that combine the principles of target shooting and Dungeons & Dragons, two pastimes that have mesmerized perhaps four females in all of recorded history.
Of all of these thousands of computer games, only one--Tetris--is popular with women, including Hillary Rodham Clinton. According to a heart-rending story published recently in the Wall Street Journal, there is a 66-year-old grandmother in Indiana who is so Tetris-obsessed that she plays five hours a day, prompting her granddaughter to inquire about treatment centers!
The thrust of the Journal story is that software designers are analyzing Tetris’ distaff appeal in hopes of creating more games that attract women, thus, doubling the market! Great idea. But will the guys charged with solving the puzzle be able to stop playing Sim City long enough to do it?
What does this mean for the mature woman with a computer? It means she should find herself some of these nice young experts and let them ease her way onto the Infobahn. In fact, many of you have probably given birth to one already. If so, don’t waste a nanosecond feeling guilty about asking for help. You’ve already prepaid through the year 2000 in laundry. Expect to be patronized a bit even as you are assisted. One of my son’s friends recently gave me his electronic mail address and when he came to the @ that is a standard feature, he didn’t call it an “at,” as he would have with his cyberbuds, he called it “an ‘a’ with a lasso around it.” Do I care? I do not. He is generous to a fault with his formidable expertise and, like my son, has already helped me skip the “Hooked on Phonics” phase of mastering my machine and get to the good parts.
You think it’s wrong for a woman to allow men to do the electronic equivalent of opening the car door for her? I’ll bet Gloria Steinem has a couple of male hackers in her Rolodex, and I’ll tell you who else doesn’t think it’s cheating. Guys. Men who are just getting started on the Internet sometimes adopt female-sounding computer names in hopes of enlisting the aid of the male computing majority. These men in electronic drag know that another male’s cry for help is routinely dismissed with the abrupt message, “RTM,” computerese for “Read the Manual.” The actual response is usually “RTFM,” but remember, standards of behavior in cyberspace are closer to “Lord of the Flies” than to a church picnic.
A lot of women are excited by the information revolution, and they want to make sure that they get on the Information Superhighway too. Barbara Stites, who lives in Van Nuys, is frustrated because she doesn’t yet have the money to upgrade her computer. Stites, 47, got her master’s degree in history at Cal State Northridge a couple of years ago, and she is eager to tap into the many electronic archives that could advance her research on life in Mississippi in the early 1800s. But she needs a whole new system, including a modem, to do that. “I need to be able to get out there and communicate,” she said. Stites worries that the Internet is creating an electronic elite and an electronic underclass, made up of people without the money or training or even time to take advantage of the opportunities being created by the new technology.
“If you’re connected,” Stites observed, “you get the benefits. And if you’re not, you don’t.”
The Personal Computer: A Really Versatile Small Appliance
I bought my new computer because I thought it would make my life easier. It would allow me to work on stories at odd hours, late at night, for instance, without having to schlep into the office.
And I thought it would encourage me to do more of my own writing. This was an issue I had been brooding about lately with one of my dearest friends, a woman I met on our first day of sixth grade.
A college professor in upstate New York, Toni is an anthropologist, a mother of five and a superb writer in at least two languages (she also has a black belt in karate). But in recent years she has been increasingly troubled by the question of whether, as a writer, she has been a good steward to her talent. And so she came up with a plan that would help us both. We would start writing to each other regularly and see what our correspondence became. Maybe a book, maybe two books, maybe nothing at all beyond a stack of letters. Whatever we produced, we knew we would have a great time doing it. Because long before we had computers, we were teen-age best friends who spent hundreds of nights whispering happily to each other on such eternally fascinating subjects as books, men (boys, we called them then) and the meaning of life. Now Toni and I would whisper electronically, probably on the same topics.
So far we have got as far as exchanging e-mail addresses.
Things I have actually done on the computer (besides routine writing):
1. Installed a personal-finance program. Like most people, I dream of a perfectly balanced checkbook, meticulously tracked investments, a balanced budget--the economic equivalent of being born again. And with this software, I thought, peace of mind--if not wealth--would be mine. Of course, to achieve fiscal Nirvana I first had to input all the boring details of my financial life, including the particulars of every check I’ve written since the first of the year, into my computer. At which point, I realized that, for the time being at least, my laudable desire for financial order can be met quite adequately, thank you, by my check register and a pocket calculator.
2. Played Tetris. Bor-ing. I just don’t get the appeal. Should I get my estrogen levels checked?
3. Lurked on the Internet. You can do amazing things on the Internet--tap into entire libraries, including the Vatican’s, for instance--but one of the most fun things you can do is to look at the messages people send each other on the system’s 4,000 newsgroups. The technical term for reading these messages (which are public), without participating in the exchange, is lurking, and it is a revelation.
First of all, you scroll through an electronic list of the myriad newsgroups in existence, and you choose the ones that pique your imagination. The best place to start is the stuff labeled with the prefix alt., for alternative. This is cyberspace’s answer to the tabloids, except more so, since you can actually tap into the mind-set of people with every imaginable sexual fantasy as well as such decidedly minority enthusiasms as Chia pets, ketchup and (I am not making this up) Karl Malden’s nose.
Serious concerns are also shared among newsgroup participants--a number are devoted to recovery and to specific disabilities and disorders. This week, for example, a man told alt.support.stuttering that he stutters and said he’d appreciate information about the genetic basis of the condition since his 7-year-old son stutters too. But for every serious newsgroup, there are two that remind you just how zany, even demented, your fellow computer users truly are. You try not to peek when you encounter such provocative forums as alt.psychotic.roommates, alt.sexy.bald.captains or alt.conspiracy.abe-lincoln.
Which is how I found myself eavesdropping recently on a newsgroup devoted entirely to bashing Barney. Alt.tv.dinosaurs.barney.die.die.die is the place to go if you think the big purple guy may cause cavities (of tooth or brain) in his young fans. Messages about Barney--a.k.a “the purple pervert” and “the spongy one”--included the news that Barney had been named (for unstated reasons) in a $77.9-million lawsuit. A woman added to the group’s growing body of “Insidious Barney Symbolism Theories,” by reporting, “My 3-year-old daughter and I have come to the same conclusion: That Barney is a sick representation of a phallic object.” That prompted another group member to respond: “Now that you mention it, I think I can see it. Gives all new meaning to ‘I love you. You love me. . . .’ ” And, of course, there were the Barney song parodies, including:
I hate you.
You hate me.
We’re gonna go out and kill Barney.
And the shots rang out and Barney hit the floor.
No more purple dinosaur!
This is nothing more than good clean spleen. I have yet to encounter the really Dark Side of the Force. More and more Internet users are apparently playing rough, engaging in nasty electronic encounters known as flame wars. Wired magazine ran a recent story about the feud between a group of cat lovers and a group called alt.tasteless , who stopped swapping dead-baby jokes long enough to torment the feline enthusiasts with cruel postings, such as a request for a recipe for Polynesian cat. Turks and Armenians have apparently taken their ancient differences with them into cyberspace. But so far I’ve only seen the sunny side of the Infobahn. One of my favorite things about computers is how playful they are. Last time I went into Microsoft Word to edit a story, the program sent me the following tip of the day: “Did you know you can hurt yourself if you run with scissors?”
Is this a great technology, or what?
A Final Word
Almond. My new computer is definitely almond.
