Sitting Alone In Good Company

"One day I wandered into an over 30 chat room and there it began." So says Meg Ryan in You've Got Mail - and the world suddenly falls over at the discovery of the human interactions enabled by the Internet.

It has taken a movie to cut to the chase of this oft-maligned and misunderstood medium. I haven't seen the movie. I don't really need to. I have lived its contents. I am just glad that everyone else is seeing it. The tale goes that before Tom Hanks did the film, he had tried out the Internet Relay Chat facility which allows people to talk to each other in real time, and had entered a channel and found no one there. So he logged off in some degree of disgust, generally disappointed by the medium. I can't confirm that story. I read it in an English paper. But I have read an online article by Hanks in which he sings praises to what he has discovered of the internet. He now so favors email that he would happily have his phone disconnected.

I feel a bit the same. Email is the most liberating form of communication. It is swift. It is low-effort. There are no envelopes to address or stamps to affix, let alone expeditions to letter boxes required. It is a simple click of the mouse button and the mail is sent. But, my net friends, who urge me to offer elucidation on the subject, protest that email is not everything on the Internet.

The movie You've Got Mail has created more interest and discussion among the online ommunities than any of the earlier efforts of the film world in dealing with the Internet. Most net-oriented films have generated nothing more than remote disdain in the Net world. They have been a bit silly. And, apart from a couple of specific talk programs, computers do not show words on a screen one letter at a time to anyone except the writer. Why do film makers insist on this piece of absurd artifice?

Why do they create hackers who can just whisk into a protected top secret site? Hackers stay up all night for weeks to crack the codes and passwords on high security sites. It makes one think that filmmakers don't do their homework very well. Verite is nothing.

You've Got Mail, on the other hand, is deemed by the net world to be a "cute" movie which explains to some extent what is the interest and attraction among real people online. Sometimes, as I take my regular evening half hour or so of catching up with online friends around the world, I envisage them all - in snow-bound America, the chill of Europe, the bright light of Israel, the warmth of Brazil, the humidity of Malaysia... From diverse, distant places, we link together as a group, comparing notes on life, sharing our joys and sorrows, becoming friends. Our keyboarding fingertips link our minds across that strange expanse we call "cyberspace". Sitting alone in good company, that's what we are doing.

For those who are suspicious about computers, let me point out that computers are people, too. A computer without an operator is just hardware. All sorts of people are out there. Some of them are not nice. But it doesn't take long to find out who's who and to learn the ropes of protecting onself against unwelcome advances or idiocy. As in real life, one gravitates towards people with things in common and avoids that which is uninteresting.

And yes, relationships are formed. Many. I can no longer count the number of net-born marriages and partnerships among my Internet communities. I count among them. Not all of these relationships succeed. There are no statistics, but I would punt that the success average is probably higher in net unions than in real life unions because of the way in which the relationship is established - head-to-head without the distractions and triggers of conventional social interaction. There is a tendency towards uncompromising honesty and intimacy when you are not looking someone in the eye all the time.

And yes, some people are taken for a ride. Gullible and lonely people are vulnerable to their own dreams. Exploitative people are good at finding such victims. But at least, online, the community rallies to support and often to warn the victims and to ostracise the ill-doer.

Online communities are a fascinating study. Groups of people, from all manner of global and occupational backgrounds, collect in channels which one may liken to virtual parish pumps where, as in all life everywhere, they find their places in a hierarchy of sorts. While the Internet is essentially an anarchical entity, its users assert a strong sense of order and justice. Sometimes little wars erupt as the balance is maintained.

I have seen many changes over the six and more years I have been online - but I remain in contact with some of the first people I encountered. They are old friends. I have met many of them and stayed with some of them while travelling. Some have come here to meet me. Net friendships are a serious stimulus in the travel business.

But there is more. So much more in the benefits of human interactivity on the Internet. There is the instant communication with family members across the world, of academics and students with each other, of business... There is the convenience of emailing unfinished work to finish at home and email back completed - not to mention the flexibility to work from anywhere. There is access to the biggest library in history on the World Wide Web.

The Internet is the most significant human learning and communication development since the invention of the printing press. Don't resist it. Fall in love with it or on it.

Saline, January 1999