Internet a Safety Net for an Ailing On-Line Senior

She’s 68 and slowed by Parkinson’s Disease, but Ilene Weinberg roams the world of computer networks like a spry teen-ager.

So her on-line friends knew there was something wrong when Weinberg’s normally sunny chatter became garbled on their computer screens.

Somehow they found a way to send help--even though they didn’t know her real name or where she lived.

“I was in trouble, more trouble than I wanted to be in alone,” Weinberg said. “I just put the capitals on and I said: ‘PLEASE EVERYBODY LISTEN.’ ”

Weinberg kept typing, disoriented and shaking from a bad mix of medication. The next thing she knew, the phone rang.

“It was the police and they said they were sending an ambulance.”

Weinberg’s turned out to be a relatively minor medical emergency, unlike a case last year when a New Jersey computing analyst stricken by a heart attack managed to e-mail his work mates for help.

“Are you the one on the computer?” paramedics asked when they arrived at Weinberg’s home in suburban Newton. They determined she wasn’t seriously ill and waited while she called her own doctor, who tended to the problem.

The tricky part was finding Weinberg, because her unseen saviors knew her only by the alias she uses on the SeniorNet computer bulletin board.

They pieced together her identity using what they knew from earlier conversations and from a computer directory of network members.

“They were like detectives,” Weinberg said.

Weinberg has been using SeniorNet, run by a San Francisco-based nonprofit group and America Online, since her son gave her a computer and modem last summer.

A retired social worker who uses a wheelchair much of the time, she spends up to eight hours a day exchanging e-mail with family and friends, and holding on-screen conversations with people she has never seen.

Like many elderly people who use the networks, Weinberg says the computer has opened up new horizons and cut down on isolation.

SeniorNet is more than a chat-line. The organization runs 70 learning centers to teach people over 55 how to use computers and offer technical help. It sells discounted tutorials and books, SeniorNet vice president Frankie Kangas said.

SeniorNet’s 14,500 members pay $35 annually to belong. Of that group, 2,000 pay an additional $9.95 a month to join America Online and get unlimited access to SeniorNet’s computer bulletin board.

Conversations on the bulletin board on a recent night included discussions of movies, sports and walks.

There is also something strangely liberating about a world in which the only physical element is a line of type on a computer monitor, Weinberg said.

“I’m an old lady, except when I’m on-line. Then I’m 37, blond and ready to roll,” she said, laughing, a few days after the incident.