SAN FRANCISCO -- When Richard Weideman spent 88 days locked in a glass cubicle in the Telkom Exploratorium in Cape Town, South Africa, he worked, ate and slept at his PC -- with only an Internet connection to communicate. Weideman spent nearly every waking moment between Jan. 31 and April 27 in front of a computer -- more time than even the most diligent of the Silicon Valley workforce. 'I aim to prove that even though all my communication is limited to an Internet connection, for 88 days I can interact with the outside world on a international basis as well or better than through any other conventional channels of communication,' Weideman wrote on his homepage. Weiderman's case was extreme, but computer junkies are finding ways to use computers for increasing numbers of everyday tasks. Jared Floyd, a computer science student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has an camera flashing images of his room across the Internet and uses his computer as an answering machine. 'Hi, you've reached Jared Floyd's computer,' the recording starts, possibly catching some people off-guard. The next step, he said, is to arrange for the computer to track him down and forward calls. Floyd, like many others, also uses the computer for planning events with friends, correspondence, scheduling and finding information on everything from movies to topical research. 'It's definitely easier to communicate, and it's kind of socially the way things work,' he said. 'I'd rather send email than call because it's more convenient -- if they're on the phone they can still get the message.'
Computers play an enormous role in the workplace and home with e- mail, quick information queries and entertainment on the World Wide Web, as well as programs that organize information and schedule appointments. Marianne LaFrance, a psychology professor at Boston College, said that the time when people were decrying 'computer phobia,' 'computer shock,' 'terminal terror' and 'network neurosis' -- less than 10 years ago -- has long passed. 'Now we're starting to see the flip side,' she said. 'Some people prefer to have computers and are more positive about that environment than one offered by people.' As computers have decreased in size, improved on user-friendly software and entered peoples' daily lives, researchers have looked at the psychological implications and possible dependence on the inanimate machines. It is not a new area of interest. In the decades since computers became a reality, people have been intimidated by seemingly unfeeling machines that did not take people into account and were a threat to employment, privacy and security. more
'When you have a mainframe in an air-conditioned room and you have to be qualified to get access to it, it's a very different image from an appliance you can buy and put on your desk,' said Oliver Strimpel, director of the Computer Museum in Boston. 'It's now a more friendly thing.' Since computers became user-friendly and accessible, worst-case scenarios have also advanced, including the exploitation of experts who might lose ownership of knowledge, human expertise dimming from disuse or ceasing to develop and computers inhibiting the way people think, LaFrance said. More prevalent, though, is the belief that while the good of computers outweighs the bad, people view information systems as trustworthy simply because the information is transmitted in digital form. 'People don't understand that what a computer can do is a product of what has been fed into it,' Strimpel said. 'They don't have the right critical abilities, sort of like believing everything that's on television.' Expert systems, such as those that help choose university applicants and make medical diagnoses, are seen as amazing, appear to be objective and can explain themselves, which also stops people from questioning the technology, LaFrance said. 'Our surveys have shown that it's not the naive user who has a grand faith in computer programming, but the computer veteran,' she said. 'The more experienced the user, the more likely people say that there are many areas in which working with computers has unique advantages to working with people.' The Association for Computing Machinery will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a conference analyzing how information technology will affect the environment, global economy and society in the next 50 years. The event, scheduled for March 1997 in San Jose, will gather speakers from the computer industry, research institutions, universities and the government to 'start a dialogue about the long-term future of information technology and computers,' said Joseph DeBlasi, executive director of the Association for Computing Machinery. Discussion of future technological application is far more important than the accuracy of predictions, said DeBlasi, a former director with IBM. 'We hope to map out some kind of vision for how human life and social aspects will change,' he said. 'Dependence on this technology can be positive, but it requires us to be very diligent. We're going to have to be more informed about how to judge the quality and accuracy of information in the future.' The Internet is one step in bringing information to the mass media, he said, and the next step is the development of applications to present information differently than in the past. 'We have to plan so we can effectively use these things without losing the human aspects of ourselves,' DeBlasi said. 'We want to raise a generation that doesn't just stare at the screen without thinking, but knows how to use the information.' RELATED SITES ON THE WEB: 88 Days in Cyberspace - http://www.woza.co.za/woza/ Jered Floyd's homepage - http://www.mit.edu/people/jared/home.html The Computer Museum - http://www.tcm.org The Association for Computing Machinery - http://www.acm.org Chronology of events in the history of microcomputers - http://www.islandnet.com/kpolsson/comphist.htm Hobbes' Internet Timeline - http://info.isoc.org/guest/zakon/Internet/History/HIT.html
