Daily Life’s Digital Divide

Like almost everyone she knows, Dianna Boundy believes in the righteousness of the digital revolution.

Twelve hours a day, she’s “jacked in.” At work, she designs computer games and e-mails her colleagues just down the hall. At home she surfs the Web till midnight, balances her electronic checkbook and e-mails friends around the world. In between, there’s her cellular phone and new car stereo--the one that purrs “hello” when she turns it on.

She doesn’t know Richard Murphy.

Ignoring friends’ entreaties, he has refused to sign up for an Internet account. He’s done his share of “surfing” and writes his screenplays on a laptop. But he mourns those who have been swallowed by the cyber-void, and talks back to TV commercials that define a hip, happy life as the ability to experience things without actually being there.

Boundy: “I love it. I love technology, and all that it gives you. I see it as a necessary step in our evolution.”

Murphy: “It’s just another way to hide. We’re creating things that then create us. My friends know where I live. They can come visit.”

The Angelenos, both in their 20s, represent a widening rift in American attitudes and personal choices about the powerful new technologies unfurling genie-like into the center of everyday life.

Along with familiar touchstones like drugs or abortion, digital technology has taken on a totemic quality, evoking fears and hopes about the future. As computers infiltrate the home and the Internet weaves its tangled web, friends and families find themselves split by social fissures that never before had reason to exist.

Already there are signs that uneven access to technology is deepening the divide between rich and poor. And cracks predictably have opened along generational lines, as older folks--i.e., anyone who never played Nintendo--balk at learning Netscape 2.1 or, for that matter, how to program a VCR.

But a more voluntary partition is under construction as well, uncircumscribed by traditional demographics and galvanized by strongly held views about whether today’s technology is a force for progress or destruction.

Many Americans, disillusioned by the Nuclear Age’s legacy of environmental disaster and genocide, and saddened by what they see as the depersonalization of modern life, are deeply suspicious of a new generation of engineering solutions to the world’s problems.

Others, inflamed by the potential for global communication, electronic democracy and new forms of art and commerce insist that, this time around, the enlightenment promise of better living through rationality and science will be realized.

And even among the less ideologically inclined, the communication gap between those who “get it” and those who prefer not to strains dinner conversations and puts stress on marriages. Ann Landers routinely answers pleas from self-described online widows--and widowers (the former are far more common).

“It’s a real sore point with me,” says Linda Irvin, 44, of her husband Art’s computer habit. “I get a peck on the cheek and he’s in the bedroom and the computer’s on, he’s checking his e-mail. He tells me I should learn it but, you know, I really don’t want to. I don’t want to be addicted like that.”

“I’m guilty,” says Art, 46, though he has promised never to explore the chatrooms that have frayed many a real-world relationship with the titillating promise of a zip-less flirt. “To me, figuring out the computer is a combination of creativity and challenge. And it’s a frustration to me that Linda hasn’t realized yet that she really needs to know how to do this.”

The Techno-Edge

The history of technological progress--as it always has been called--gives the Dianna Boundys and the Art Irvins the edge, and they know it. A sense of almost complacent optimism pervades their side of the high-tech divide. Declares one believer: “Technology is a force of nature and it can’t be stopped.”

Popular culture backs them up, even as it underscores a heightened anxiety about their ascent. In a recent episode of TV’s “Friends,” Chandler and Ross try to make a list on Chandler’s new laptop.

“We’ll put the names in bold with different fonts and I can use different colors for each column,” Chandler says.

“Can’t we just use a pen?” asks Ross.

“No, Amish boy,” Chandler replies, with withering scorn.

‘Silicon Snake Oil’

But particularly striking, observers say, is the number and diversity of those who choose--or at least wish they could choose--to opt out of the bleeping arcade of modems and touch-screen kiosks.

At one end of the spectrum is the extremist anti-technology rhetoric of the Unabomber manifesto--with which many law-abiding citizens admit to feeling uncomfortably in sync. There also is a fledgling neo-Luddite movement, proudly bearing the moniker of the masked men who smashed machines at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

And a stack of new books with titles like “Rebels Against the Future” and “Silicon Snake Oil” elucidate the dangers of blind surrender to technology. They raise the specter of machines replacing humans, eliminating jobs in the name of an automated reality. A major concern is the ease with which privacy can be violated in a world that breaks down into strings of ones and zeros.

But the bulk of the objectors are those like Murphy. Less activist in his approach and perhaps not quite so reasoned in his rhetoric, he believes that technology threatens to sap the soul out of literature, movies and human interaction.

His worst fear is that digitization will make for an ever-more homogenized culture, enabling Hollywood and corporate entities to better parse out what people want, and feed it to them ever more efficiently.

“It’s as easy as point and click,” Murphy jeers, mimicking a favorite catch-phrase of high-tech promotion. “They even have this program out now that walks you through how to write a screenplay. That’s crazy.”

He finds his own small ways to resist the techno-undertow. A producer asked him to rewrite one of his protagonists as a computer whiz. He refused.

Another digital refusenik is Candace Bliss, 25. After spending hundreds of hours online and hundreds of dollars on service charges, she cut off her Internet account this year and stowed her computer in the basement of her Hercules, Calif., home.

“I was addicted,” says Bliss, a massage therapist. “It feels like you’re getting a lot done because you’re going through all these changes online and in your head, but you’re still sitting in the same place.”

Nor did she find social life in cyberspace (“Where nobody knows you’re a dog”) superior to the real world. An African American, Bliss says she received several racist comments. And after participating in a women-only online group, she says, “I felt like I was back in high school.”

Suzanne Silverglate’s defiance of the technology gods is more pragmatic. The mother of two works at home in Santa Cruz where her husband’s top-of-the-line PC glares at her all day, but she says she has no time to learn to use it.

“I have a lot of other priorities, and honestly, it’s easier for me to pull out the typewriter,” she says. Which wouldn’t bother her, except that she feels so much pressure from her husband, her father, her twin sister and the world at large to get with the program.

“I resent it,” she says. “There’s an arrogance, like they know and we don’t, and that’s really awful.”

Thoreau’s Legacy

In a gadget-happy society that has celebrated innovations from the locomotive to the microwave oven as pathways to utopia, the backlash against things digital is a break with the past.

Ambivalence toward technology regularly pops up in American history, from Thoreau’s contemplations on Walden Pond to the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s. But by far the dominant attitude has been enthusiastic embrace.

“The belief that history is a record of the increasing knowledge of and control over nature through science and technology and that on the whole that produces a better life for people has been around since this country was founded,” says Leo Marx, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And it’s gone pretty much unchallenged until this century.”

European Enlightenment ideals, which were gaining currency at the time of the American Revolution, found resonance in the New World, where there was no established church, no monarchy and no entrenched institutions to oppose them.

When electrification began in the late 1800s, many Americans believed it would cure disease. World fairs boosted technology and progress. And more recently, America’s technology fetish has driven sales of personal computers, camcorders and Walkmen to dizzying heights.

But sociologists and historians say the digital revolution cannot help but be colored by what many saw as the betrayal of Industrial Revolution technology that made possible the slaughter of millions during World War II--and the devastation of nuclear weapons. And it’s not at all clear that technology has lived up to its promise to improve productivity and create more leisure time.

“The controlling view of optimism has been eroded by events like Hiroshima and Bhopal,” says Marx.

Another reason for the intensity of the backlash is that the stakes are so high. “We’re in the process of seeing a fundamental shift in many of the basic assumptions,” says Gary T. Marx, a sociologist at the University of Colorado. “There is something qualitatively different here.”

It follows, then, that those who embrace the vision of a digital world would do so all the more fiercely. They see the coming of a new society tantamount to the leap from hunters and gatherers to organized agriculture, and from an agrarian to an industrial society. Many of them believe this new world can be more egalitarian--or at least a lot of fun.

Wired magazine, the neon-drenched propaganda arm of the digital elite, perhaps is the most extreme evangelist, with regular features such as “Technolust” and editorials against government attempts to regulate computer networks.

Books with titles like “Being Digital” argue that technology will lead to a more democratic society, new forms of social intimacy, easier work and a smaller world.

And then there is the new breed of technophiles like Boundy, who wants to build a house where “everything is computer-controlled and the lights go on and off when you go in and out of rooms.

“Technology is neutral,” she says, echoing an oft-heard refrain among the digerati. “It’s how it’s used and who uses it. Just like ‘Guns don’t kill people, people do.’ ”

Boundy prefers to e-mail her colleagues rather than walk over to assign them a task because she can put a tracer on the mail and know when they’ve read it.

But she also has had intimate conversations over the Internet with people hundreds of miles away. Not to mention her electronic exchanges with her friend who works a few miles away.

When that friend, Erik Gavriluk, recently moved to Los Angeles from Seattle, the movers lost the box containing his remote controls--all 14 of them. The son of a lead-pencil English teacher, Gavriluk says he has avoided clashes with his parents but finds himself increasingly irritated by the others’ refusal to join the modern age.

“I can always deal with ignorance, it’s the stupidity I find disturbing,” says Gavriluk, a computer programmer. “The other day I was meeting with an agent who wanted me to design a Web site for his client and he clearly knew nothing about it. He’s like, ‘Well, you know, I can barely get my fax machine to work.’ Well, you know, that is just so tired.”

Lisa Goldman, 33, says she is more sad than angry about technological antagonists. Her Internet company arose out of a discussion on The WELL, an online service based in Northern California. Staffers still refer to each other almost exclusively by their electronic handles: “pighead” or “botharc cronus.”

When the firm rented an office in San Francisco, their “Webmistress” moved from Australia. Other employees came from Kansas and Pennsylvania. “What this is about is forming new kinds of communities,” says Goldman. “These Luddite people are shutting themselves out from that.”

She turned to The WELL again when her closest friend died last year, joining a conference where people talked about the meaning of death. “It really made a big difference to me,” she says. “You can’t just walk up to somebody and start talking about death. But online you can actually be more revealing of yourself and find people who are accepting of you.”

Reliance on E-Mail

Increasingly, these two opposing groups, filled with people of similar ages, incomes and educational backgrounds, are operating in separate social spheres. Parallel cultures may be emerging, with their own values, languages and world views.

“At this point half the professors at my university live on e-mail. But a quarter of them won’t come near it or have anything to do with it,” says Tom Landauer, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado who has studied attitudes toward digital technology. “When the telephone came in some people didn’t like using it, but it never divided people this way.”

One reason for the difference, he says, is that the sheer complexity of even the “user-friendly” personal computers now in close to 40% of U.S. households tends to highlight an aptitude gap.

He cites one test that measures how long it takes a secretary to type a business letter. On a typewriter, the fastest typically takes half the time of the slowest.

On a PC, the gap widens to 3:1, or even 5:1. The same is true for tasks involving computerized supermarket and airline counters.

Moreover, for those who do grasp it, and like it, the oft-touted interactivity of digital technology makes it more compelling--and more addictive--than anything before it. From CD-ROM games to ATM machines, computer software offers what programmers call more “immersive” environments. New forms of artificial intelligence allow programs to respond with more subtlety and realism. And increasingly, the technology is mobile.

Perhaps most significantly, the technology that is growing fastest--the computer network--is unique in its facility for linking people to each other and to information.

Unlike the vacuum cleaner or the VCR, which were designed to make work easier and entertainment at home more fun, the point of the Internet is to transport users beyond their physical surroundings and the people who inhabit them.

All of that is double-edged.

The Silverglates now have “date nights” every two weeks because Suzanne’s husband spends so much time on the computer. Whether he’s working or using the Internet to plan their vacation to Oaxaca, Suzanne says, she doesn’t see him.

“It’s almost like it has a mystical air about it or something, it’s like it takes over,” says Linda Irvin, recalling a recent vacation to Jamaica where Art took the laptop to the beach. “If I’m reading a book, I can close it and put it down. But when he’s on this machine that’s talking back to him and responding, it’s much harder.”

Even at home in Riverside, it sucks him in.

“I think I’m more available, because I used to go to Colorado to go hunting or fishing and I’d be away the whole weekend,” says Art. “Now I’m gone, but I’m still here.”

Divisive Language

For good friends and roommates Alison Redfoot and Jami Maloney, even the language of technology can be divisive.

“Jami’s always explaining some word to me,” Redfoot says. “Last night she wanted to use our phone so she could work her e-mail. ‘Oh I just need to dadadadadada, so do you mind if I use the telephone line for an hour?’ I was like, ‘Uh, sure.’ ”

Redfoot, 30, says she likes to sew and garden. While she does, Maloney is usually on the computer.

“I know Alison doesn’t think it’s very important,” says Maloney, who recently returned from a technology trade show to find 230 e-mail messages waiting. “But this is fun, I feel like it’s the future and I’m a part of it.”

Says Redfoot: “It’s not my future. I’m not embarrassed to not be into that world, because I don’t have as much respect for it. E-mail is great and fast and cheap and all those things. But you know what? I love stamps. I love opening up a letter and the smell of the paper and the way it involves all your senses. There’s nothing better than walking to your postbox and getting a card from someone with stamps.”