Sex and the Cyber-Hysterical

With all due respect to Tara Noble, the Kentucky girl who was apparently lured away from home by an electronic mail correspondent and later turned up on Hollywood Boulevard, there was something very revealing--and unsettling--about the way her plight became the focus of national attention.

Let’s face it, “Runaway Girl From Heartland Found on Hollywood Boulevard” doesn’t come close to qualifying as a major news story. It was the means to the end--the on-line service--that made it interesting. And thus it became the latest case of a kind of cyber-hysteria: A tendency to view an entirely ordinary phenomenon as extraordinary when it happens in cyberspace.

Examples of cyber-hysteria are everywhere these days, and many of them involve sex. Thus we are confronted with the depressing spectacle of the U.S. Senate turning the debate over an immensely important and complicated piece of communications legislation into a referendum on pornography. The senators--surprise!--are against pornography. They are therefore trying to make it illegal to transmit electronically the very same pictures that can be purchased at almost any corner store in America.

To hear the senators tell it, they are shocked--shocked!--to discover that minors might have access to dirty pictures. Similarly, parents across the nation are supposedly appalled at the terrible things their kids are doing--or could be doing--unbeknown to them in computer chat forums. Well, I didn’t have a computer when I was a teen-ager, but I can assure you my very attentive and responsible parents would have been horrified by many of my after-school activities.

The same naive indignation arises in discussions of security in cyberspace. Even businessmen who ought to know better are given to wailing about security, about how all kinds of complicated encryption schemes will be necessary to prevent electronic thieves from, say, stealing credit card numbers.

But last time I checked, stealing a credit card number was a very simple matter, and decidedly low-tech. Most of us throw away credit card receipts all the time. We freely recite the number to total strangers over the phone to order airline tickets or buy something by mail.

My computers and on-line accounts are nothing special and I don’t use encryption, but I’m certain it requires far more skill to break into my computer than to break into my apartment. Crime is a lamentable fact of life in our society. Why would we expect cyberspace to be crime-free?

There appear to be a few underlying reasons for cyber-hysteria. Certainly, there’s a superficial fascination with the novelty of it all. There is also the admittedly disquieting fact that computer networks can bring sordid activities and materials out of the streets and directly into our homes. And of course there’s our general fascination with sex and crime: The flip side of cyber-hysteria, in fact, is that the mass media in general are fixated on sex and crime, so why should the focus be any different when dealing with cyberspace?

But there is something else operating here too, an ideological belief that technology is different and that it can and should be held to a higher standard of perfection and purity. We’re talking about computers, after all! They’re incorruptible! They don’t make mistakes! They are a force for good!

Look at the outcry over the infamous bug in Intel’s Pentium microprocessor. It was a minor flaw in a type of product that experts know routinely has many flaws, but people found it hard to digest the idea that their latest and greatest technology product suffered from mundane human imperfections. It’s an ideology about technology that dates from the European enlightenment--the new will be different and better than the old--and even centuries of real-world experience hasn’t disabused people of this appealing belief.

The danger here is that expecting the new to be better can obscure what is genuinely different. Heavy reliance on computers, for example, has rendered some types of systems many times more vulnerable to failure--and therefore to sabotage or terrorism or highly sophisticated crimes--than they were before. The public telephone network, for one, is now controlled by an elaborate signaling system, and thus, to take down a broad swath of the network one need only monkey with a key piece of that system.

As people begin using personal computers to shop and go to the library and perform all kinds of other transactions, they will unwittingly be giving away all kinds of information about themselves and their habits, which marketers--and who else?--will use in all kinds of clever new ways. The privacy implications of cyber-surfing are enormous--and mostly ignored.

The social implications of the new forms of communications developing in the on-line world are also of great significance. E-mail is not the same as an electronic version of a letter or a written version of a phone call, it’s something truly new. Similarly, chat rooms and discussion forums have no equivalents in the pre-digital world.

Pornography and theft and runaway teen-agers, on the other hand, are nothing if not age-old. Titillating though they may be, such phenomena are among the least interesting things about cyberspace.