textfiles/news/v-world.txt

Programmed for Life and Death
by:  John Markoff

This spring a California man symbolically took his life by using a computer
program to seek out and destroy the contributions he had made over the years
to a continuing electronic conversation run by a computer group called the
Well.  Several weeks later, he followed this "virtual" suicide by killing
himself in the real world.
 
Blair Newman had been one of the most active members of the Well, a
five-year-old electronic community that is operated out of the offices of the
Whole Earth Review, a publisher in Sausalito, Calif., with roots in the
1960's counterculture.  Several thousand people in the Bay Area regularly use
their computers to call up the Well for an electronic, typewritten chat, and
they frequently meet face to face in more conventional gatherings.
 
Mr. Newman, a 43-year-old veteran of the personal computer industry, was such
an enthusiastic - some would say obsessive - user of the Well that many of
his friends knew him only electronically.  They describe him as a flamboyant
insomniac who could be counted on for stimulating and sometimes infuriating
late-night conversation.  But he was also known for bouts of depression.
 
After his simulated suicide in May, many members of the community dispatched
angry messages complaining that they had been wronged.  Some believed that
Mr. Newman's writings, stored on a computer disk, were the property of the
community and not his to destroy.
 
It was after this dispute, which lingered for several weeks, that Mr. Newman
took his life.
 
"For him to be done in the virtual world was to be done - period," said John
Perry Barlow, a participant in the group who is a lyricist for the Grateful
Dead.
 
some may take Mr. Newman's story as that of a disturbed computer addict who
used technology to withdraw from the world.  But others see the experience in
a different light, as a glimpse of a future in which computers change the way
people live and work, and ultimately the way they die.
 
In recent years computer networks have been emerging as a new kind of
community unlimited by geography.  While members can be spread across the
world, the ease of communication can engender an intimacy more akin to a
small 19th-century village than a 20th-century suburb.
 
Some sociologists see a dark side to all this.
 
"There is a notion of avoiding the here-and-now society," said Todd Gitlin, a
sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley.  "Part of what's
scary is that there is a blankness in here-and-now society that leads people
to prefer these virtual communities."
 
But others see the networks as a way to overcome the forced anonymity of
modern life.  While the telephone shrank the world by permitting
instantaneous one-to-one contact, and while radio and television have served
as a one-way medium to broadcast information to millions, the computer has
become a vehicle that allows hundreds of people of like values and interests
to come together in small groups.
 
Much of what has taken place was foreshadowed in a number of science fiction
novels written in the last 15 years.  In his 1981 novel "True Names" - which
has a small but devoted following among network enthusiasts - Vernor Vinge
describes a fictional world in which a small computer underground illicitly
occupies parts of a powerful global network.  IN the story, technology has
become so advanced that it is possible to stimulate highly realistic fantasy
worlds and move about and interact with people who may be located thousands
of miles away.
 
A computer-science graduate student has recently created a less elaborate
simulated universe called Tinymud, which exists within a nationwide computer
network called Internet.  A program permits dozens of people connected to the
network through personal computers or work stations to create simulated
personas and use them to explore a fantasy world that the players themselves
constantly recreate.
 
Similar to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, the game lacks the
dazzling graphics associated with Mr. Vinge's story.  Tinymud's universe
consists entirely of written descriptions, and wandering through it is like
reading a novel - or like being a character in one.  And in a meta-fictional
twist, each player can also play author, adding new regions for other players
to explore.
 
IN recent months the game has become a fad on college campuses.  By signing
on to the network, one can travel through an interactive text filled with
details of the geography of the Boston area, or electronically visit the Yale
University campus.
 
In addition to shrinking distances and stretching imaginations, computer
networks also provide anonymity.  Such an environment can lead to behaviour
that would not be so readily tolerated in real life.  Recently, in a posting
on a computer network, a Wesleyan University student complained about sexual
harassment in the Tinymud game.
 
"Just because my character is female and has a vaguely attractive
description, and just because I choose to flirt with some people, some jerk
thinks my sexuality is public property," the student wrote.  (It is not known
whether the character's creator was male or female.)

Someday electronic communities could be futuristic, high-tech paradises. But
for now they function more as primitive societies, still groping for social
codes.
 
Mr. Barlow, the lyricist, said he once believed that computer conferences
would never become real communities until they could address sex and death in
ritual terms.
 
"Marriages and funerals are the binding ceremonies in real towns," he said,
"but they have a hard time happening among the disembodied."
 
In the case of Mr. Newman, his friends have tried to assuage their grief by
what may be the first electronic funeral.  Shortly after his death, they
created a new computer file including all of his old writings, which, it
turns out, had been saved on a backup disk.  They have also compiled a
eulogy, hundreds of pages of testimonials available on the system.  Included
is this observation from Mitchell D. Kapor, the founder of the Lotus
Development Corporation and now chairman of On Technology:

"He was a unique character, and perhaps the limitations of space and time
were just too much for someone with so many ideas and inspirations."

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The above article was found in the New York Times some time in November 1990,
and brought to my attention by Victoria, of The Pinnacle Club BBS.  It seems
to me to have enough relevance to our situation, using Bulletin Boards in New
Zealand, to be worth spending a little while typing it in.
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 Bernadette Mooney - SysOp - The Pinnacle Club BBS - Auckland - New Zealand
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