Reality Bytes : On-line programs close the distance between us . . . and the rest of the world. : You can find a wife in Norway, a child in Russia, a lost sister in Germany.
It wasn’t exactly love at first byte when Steve Schonberger and Kari Haug hooked up on the Internet. They were members of a discussion group on modern rock music, but the geographic vibes made romance unlikely: He lived in Minnesota, she in Norway.
Still, they chatted via E-mail for several months, spoke on the phone and eventually were smitten during a brief visit when Schonberger made a European ski trip. In 1991, three years after those first fateful keystrokes, he flew to Oslo and proposed. The couple now lives in Redmond, Wash.
Jamie Berke and her husband, Steve, of Springfield, Va., planned to adopt a deaf child when Jamie began scanning various on-line adoption bulletin boards. In February, 1993, she was excited to find a message regarding the availability of a 5-year-old boy at a Russian orphanage from a woman who had just adopted two little girls there. Eight months later, the Berkes picked up their son, Danny. Now, Jamie, who is deaf, runs the free Deaf Adoption News Service on the Internet to match children with prospective parents.
Tony Rutkowski, executive director of the Internet Society in Reston, Va., recalls introducing the computer-based technology to employees at Sprint, where he worked at the time. He decided to use the family name of a bright young staffer who had come to the United States from Vietnam to demonstrate how a knowledge robot can locate individual addresses.
As the “knowbot” flashed names it had found, Rutkowski noticed that the young man was crying. One of the names that had popped up was that of the man’s long-lost sister, who was connected to the Internet in Germany.
Such stories now occur daily in cyberspace, where families are being created, expanded and reunited through a worldwide computer network. The most intimate of personal bonds are being forged or renewed on a medium that, while seemingly impersonal, represents a powerful channel to communicate and to connect.
“It’s rebinding people in ways that I don’t think we’ve seen in a long time,” said David Farber, Moore professor of telecommunications at the University of Pennsylvania. “It binds families together.”
Already, interactive programs do more than shatter the limitations of geography. They provide a means for individuals to interact with many others simultaneously. And they create forums that bring together people with similar interests--singles seeking friendship, adult adoptees searching for birth parents, or the politically engaged who want to debate the wisdom of Newt Gingrich.
These communities of interests, some experts say, are themselves becoming virtual extended families. Consider the recent experience of Illene Weinberg, 68, of Newton, Mass., who suffers from Parkinson’s disease and uses a wheelchair but gets around nimbly on the Internet. Disoriented and shaking from a bad mix of medicine, she sent out an electronic cry for help to fellow regulars on the SeniorNet bulletin board on America Online; they, in turn, called her local police, who summoned paramedics.
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For all its futuristic qualities, the medium also represents a throwback. At a time of concern about declining appreciation for the written word, the rapid growth of computer-based communications has placed renewed emphasis on the carefully composed thought. E-mail relationships represent an updated version of being pen pals--with the enormous advantage of instantaneous response (on-line regulars dismiss conventional correspondence as “snail mail”).
Many say this permits a quick and comfortable intimacy that is strikingly unusual in this day and age. The result: on-line love letters.
“If the other person is being honest with you, you don’t have to pretend,” said Frances Allen, who was living in New Jersey when she met her future husband, a Houston plumber, on-line in 1992. “You get to see the real person; you don’t see the facade.”
Brian Stonehill, an English professor who directs the media studies program at Pomona College, compares electronic communication “to the confession booth, where you cannot be seen by the person you’re confiding in. E-mail gives you a kind of intimacy at the same time it gives you a kind of isolation or privacy.”
These qualities are beginning to lead to efforts to keep troubled relationships or families together on-line. Some see considerable potential for using electronic communications in marriage counseling or group therapy. Dr. Carolyn Dean, a New York physician, said she has seen this work for couples who are not communicating well face-to-face.
“Even if one’s on a computer upstairs or downstairs, it gives people enough detachment to solve problems,” she said.
But there are pitfalls. Absent facial expression, body language or intonation of voice, there is much danger for misunderstanding (which can lead to “flaming,” or firing off angry messages). In response, a system of symbols--called “emoticons”--has evolved. These include a sideways smile :-), wink ;-), frown :-( and kiss *.
The greatest vulnerability is abuse of trust. The Internet offers “a veil of anonymity” that renders it prone to exploitation. Pornography is a growing problem, as is pedophilia. And some users turn out simply to be someone other than who they say they are.
Ironically, just such a concern brought one couple together.
Steven Baumrucker had just gone on-line in 1988 when he stumbled on a discussion in a “singles room.” Deborah Turner was complaining that many men on-line say “they’re doctors, lawyers, CEOs, when they’re really married, unemployed and have seven kids.” Baumrucker, 33, a physician, responded by asking: “Well, what if you are a doctor?”
At this point, Turner, 28, a separated mother of two who managed and sold real estate in Albany, N.Y., and Baumrucker, who was completing his medical residency in Kingport, Tenn., moved electronically to a “private room” where they chatted for four hours.
Things moved quickly. Five days later they spoke by phone. They exchanged photos simultaneously. By the time they met in person 18 days later, they had already proclaimed their mutual love. They wed 81 days after their first cyberspatial encounter and now live in Church Hill, Tenn.
Their experience has since inspired cinematic and literary ventures. Deborah has optioned a screenplay based on their courtship. Steven has written an unpublished book about on-line romance, called “Love at First Byte.” And the couple has compiled a data base of 12,000 electronic relationships, including thousands who have married or become seriously involved.
“Everyone’s beautiful on-line,” Steven Baumrucker said, alluding to a tendency to idealize someone known only through their words. Nevertheless, he insists that by discovering the person “from the inside out,” they will often live up to the fantasy image.
That assumes, of course, that the self-portrait is not a deliberate misrepresentation. The Baumruckers have collected their share of horror stories as well.
A female friend, who happened to be a psychologist, fell in love with a man on-line and actually planned to marry him without having met. Shortly before they were to finally get together, a woman identifying herself as the man’s sister called to say he had been killed in a car accident. She asked the psychologist to make the trip anyway to attend the funeral.
The woman flew from her home in Pennsylvania to Washington state and was taken to the sister’s apartment. Late that night, the so-called sister confessed that the fiance had never existed: She had pretended to be the man for months--and hoped that this extraordinary turn of events wouldn’t make a difference to the stunned psychologist. This kind of gender-bender, a cyberkinetic version of “The Crying Game,” is not unique in Internet annals.
But even when things work out for the well-wired, others don’t always understand.
“We spent many nights typing to each other until the sun rose--and the rates changed,” recalled a woman who met her fiance on-line. “He kept transcripts and printed every word out for us to keep”--a truly postmodern notion of romance.
She was 35, a student living in Tallahassee, Fla.; he was 45, a writer and teacher in New Orleans. They encountered each other after he read her profile--a compilation of personal background information--and messaged her: “We’ve GOT to talk!”
Although they’ve been romantically involved for four years, they’ve told their relatives that they met through a fictitious friend.
The woman, who like many of those quoted here was located and interviewed through the Internet, said: “Our families would not approve, and also meeting on-line leaves the impression of not being ‘real’ and of being desperate, something neither of us are.”
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Just as computer communications have helped many singles find spouses, it has also aided many adults who were adopted as children in the search for their birth parents or birth siblings.
The Adoption Forum, an America Online discussion group for adoptees searching for families, reports 162 reunions among its subscribers.
“There’s really no magic in adoption search; it just takes forever,” said Susan E. Friel-Williams, an American Online adoption discussion group leader who found her birth parents. “Everybody in this nation knows where they came from, but adoptees are out in the cold when it comes to genetic information . . . and a lot of medical information.”
The reunions themselves generally don’t happen on-line. Rather, various adoption discussion groups available through Prodigy and CompuServe as well as America Online provide shared expertise to newcomers.
“What does happen a lot on this list is that someone joins, is interested in finding birth parents and hasn’t a clue where to begin,” said Jeff Hartung, a psychology doctoral student at UC San Diego who established a discussion group for adult adoptees in 1993. “Our virtual community of adopted adults permits brainstorming on difficult search situations, collective sharing of resources and links to people who might be able to help.”
After four years of vainly looking on his own, Alfred Mondares, 33, contacted Friel-Williams electronically several days after he acquired a computer last August. Within five minutes, she had located his birth father in Bonita Springs, Fla., through a computerized telephone directory. Subsequently, he met not only his birth father but five half-siblings he never knew he had as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
“People spend thousands of dollars trying to find a member of a family and all I did was ask a question,” said Mondares, an emergency medical technician who lives in Fontana. “It changed my life.”
Sometimes, of course, birth parents don’t want to be found. Friel-Williams said that some will even deny that they ever put a child up for adoption. But, at least, she said, “then you know that. We never know if they want to be found unless we call and ask them.”
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The full impact of a worldwide computer web on relationships will be realized with future technological advances. Eventually, when “the content becomes the address,” the computer will be able to search through millions of individual profiles for any personal characteristics or qualities that a user requests, said Murray Turoff, co-author of “The Network Nation” (MIT Press, 1993) and the designer of the first computer conference system.
Hence, a man who desires to find a woman of a particular age, race, religion, height, hair color and educational background who also has certain interests, values and habits, will be able to obtain a list of the names and electronic addresses of all such women in the network. He will then be able to send a message to each simultaneously. A computer dating service in London already offers such 21st-Century matchmaking to its members.
This will do much more than replace yentas. It will also aid a political activist seeking like-minded individuals to pursue a cause, a collector of rare stamps seeking fellow hobbyists, or anyone seeking to become part of an electronic community of shared interests.
“This is the revolutionary change in the whole field of communications and society,” Turoff said. “A lot of what you’re seeing happen now is happening by random interaction. Think what would happen if the computer could make these things happen. This is the basic difference between this technology and every other form of communication.”
* Alan C. Miller’s Internet address is Milleral@news.latimes.com.
