Not just another pencil: Computer-mediated communication from a senior's point of view.
The WWW becomes a challenge and, for some, a modern day adventure.
Whereas Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, the rest of us discover it for ourselves. In 1973, when Carleton University's Dave Sutherland and Jay Weston founded the National Capital Freenet (NCF) and opened it to the general public, I was among the first to come running, fascinated by the concept. Sutherland, the man at the top, was so patient and helpful that even people who didn't know what they were doing were immediately able to connect and use the system. Now top man at Connectivity Partners International, Sutherland says, "The best way to predict the future, is to help invent it."
Another telling quote of the times was "The FreeNet initiative is central to Canada's transition to a knowledge-based democracy and, by extension, to an information-based economy." That was said by Jay Weston who, sitting under a maple tree on the campus one sunny afternoon, helped me persuade myself to enter Carleton's School of Journalism as a graduate student.
For me, in those early days, figuring out how to use e-mail and discussion groups was a matter of trial and error. The first NCF Systems Manager, Ian Allen, the wise wizard from Waterloo University, now a professor at Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology in Ottawa, was a great help on our own private chat line sorting sticky problems late at night.
Using NCF during the first few years were students, professors, and other young people around town. From time to time reporters would discover some old folks getting involved and we became token eldergeeks. On several occasions, lights, cameras and microphones were mounted around me by news media to record the seemingly amazing fact that an old woman was capable of manipulating a computer. I used to tell them that anyone who could knit mittens could use a computer, and my favourite metaphor in those days was "it's just another pencil."
Delving into every aspect of the Internet that was available to me, I discovered, very soon, that I was dead wrong. It is NOT just another pencil; in fact computer-mediated communication is so much more than a simple writing machine that it has metamorphosed our entire generation, including the oldest members.
We had started out as readers and listeners, learning from the printed word in prescribed texts, told to believe what we heard. Later we were given choices, but were still on the receiving end with radio, television, and reading material including newspapers of every hue. Never before, though, had we been handed a medium to which we could offer instant written response. Taking part in the process has empowered us all; we have become the tellers, along with being the listeners.
As the months rolled by and my adventures took me far afield via the Internet, it became clear that this medium had lifted us all out of the mode of receiving information, to becoming information providers. Not only did we have at our fingertips a means of sending our thoughts to anyone, including strangers, literally around the world, but the capacity to think out loud.
Our ideas now could be hurled around the planet as they came to us, even before they were fully formed. The facility of putting words into space brought home the need to think twice before hitting the "send" key. We all suffered the embarrassment of reacting too fast to a challenge, being too quick to criticize, but recovered and adapted, learning as we went along.
Those unaccustomed to writing for publication, found the ease of transmitting anything everywhere by anybody changed some respect they might have had for the computer-mediated word, replacing respect with doubt and skepticism. They discovered that whatever they read anywhere can be proven false a minute later. This, of course, has always applied variously to newspapers, magazines, billboards and books in print, but became even more emphatically true of the medium that will carry random thoughts around the world before they have even been totally thought through, and never need to be substantiated by their authors.
In the early days of the Internet, accommodation of simple personal Web sites was made very attractive, with technical assistance at no charge, on freenets. There were limits to what could be done there and as members acquired smatterings of expertise they would move on to other Internet Providers.
A co-operative community web was established by an early freenetter, Russell McOrmond, using a computer in his flat on Flora Street in Ottawa. He named it Flora, and was soon accommodating an impressive array of not-for-profit Web sites at no cost to their owners as all were volunteers, taking on various tasks within the Flora concept. This is where I opened the Ask the Doctors site described in a later chapter, which grew to such a size that it was taking me several hours every day to keep up with the correspondence. I also built my own personal Web site on Flora, with genealogy excerpts from a book I had co-authored with my husband, adding the four current generations, University connections, and links to the Web sites of a few special friends and relatives.
As books editor of The Hill Times, I had felt a need for free information about published works on the Internet so I added a Web site called New Canadian and Other Good Books to the Flora collection. Over the years the Web has become overloaded with literary sites but in those days there was little, so I linked to everything there was at the time, and included occasional book reviews.
A large list of other Web sites have been added to the co-operative Flora Community Web, from Auto-Free Ottawa to YMCA-YWCA Canoe Camping. Moved to larger downtown premises, this group maintains its original philosophy of co-operation and worthy causes. It's not an Internet Provider, just a safe friendly host for sites, e-mail, discussion groups and technical services.
Thinking with one's fingertips brings forth a whole new means of expression. Trial balloons are sent up unheralded as such. The ensuing morass of information, misinformation and disinformation could confuse anyone, though somehow those who frequent the Web learn early to discern. After a while it becomes second nature.
From interviews with people I met on the Web I found it to be not just a more efficient medium of personal expression, but, to quote Carleton University's Jan George Frajkor, "a socially and politically transformative medium."
With reference to computer-mediated communication, I quote Marshall McLuhan, even though the Internet had not come into use during his lifetime. I maintain that his basic ideas could be applied to the Internet which he, in his special wisdom, envisioned as clearly as we who have it now in our grasp.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan wrote, "Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man - the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media."
There is no doubt that the Internet fits into McLuhan's grand schema but there are nuances involved in the actual launching of thoughts over the Internet that even he could not have predicted.
His classic lesson was that it was the medium, itself, which influenced society and not the information and ideas being disseminated. This premise applied to every medium known to him at the time. For McLuhan, printing drove people apart. He contended that with the printed word, they became less dependent on one another and became more introspective, individualistic and self-centreed; that though the printed word was available to all, in the act of using it the reader was alone, reacting to the content in solitude.
As most computer users also are alone at the time of receiving messages, one could assume little difference in the end result of these two media, but with the Internet, immediate response is possible. The reader is not, therefore, completely alone. In a virtual group, he has instant access to the author of what he is reading (unless, of course, it is a quote from some other source) as well as to any other people who may be reading the same material at the same time or who may log in to it later.
McLuhan surely knew that people would thus be interconnected by the Internet, bringing society together globally by breaking down barriers, and that rather than driving men apart, this new form of communication would draw them back into groups once again.
Extending McLuhan's creative process of knowing to the whole of human society isn't here yet, but Internet users worldwide numbered 665 billion in 2002, according to the ETForecasts market research and consulting company. That's not anywhere near everybody, but it's a huge body of individuals.
In the introductory paragraph to his book, McLuhan so aptly described computer-mediated communication that he is a valid participant in any discussion of the Internet today. When he stated that we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace he knew that this new medium would be an extension of both the motor and the receptor nervous systems. On the Internet we become actors as well as audience, senders and receivers, enormously expanding the role of the user of this medium.
Previous methods of communication had their limitations where the Internet seems to have few. Thought flowing straight from mind to mind without need of words will be another step towards the ideal. For now the Internet comes very close.
The first formal information medium most of us witness, after the initial "one to one" spoken word at our mother's knee, is the printed word. At an early age we are introduced to text, the original "one to many" method of communication; one person writing and many reading. Because of our inventiveness, printed matter has been made available across vast areas. Our civilization has also considered printed matter to be worth preserving and has developed many ways to do this successfully. Archived books, newspapers, documents, research papers and other works have become durable, providing a wide permanent record of the printed word. Print as a means of communication maintains its "one to many" aspect, usually under the control of institutions, universities, publishing houses, government agencies, library boards and archive bureaucracies.
As a medium of authority, print generally involves no interaction, occasional letters to the editor notwithstanding. The reader's participation is limited to visually absorbing and interpreting.
Another major "one to many" medium available to the general public is radio. Long before today's omnipresent cacophony, with radio permeating the atmosphere non-stop, we had our little home made crystal sets. Copper wire wrapped around an empty oatmeal box would magically bring sound through a tiny bright crystal to earphones, shared so two friends could hear the stuttering, stammering words and scratchy music at the same time.
When we eventually acquired radios with loudspeakers, we would gather around, as was the custom of the day, "watching" the news, music, and dramatic productions in the same way we later watched them on television.
As with print, the radio has been a "one to many" medium. A recent trend towards "talk radio" presents an illusion of listener participation, but total control of who will speak and what will be allowed on air is still in the hands of the radio station, its announcer, its owners, and various regulatory agencies. Other than the unfettered marine radio, amateur short wave and the citizen's band, radio is a one-way medium.
Television is another "one to many" medium. Most powerful because of the impact of split-second action, state-of-the-art photography, colour, animation, and an expensive array of advertising visuals, television's "one to many" message is probably the strongest yet in the western world. Television has branched into phone-in shows, an attempt to rival radio, but as with radio, participation is controlled. The voice of the "many" is limited to their influence on the advertisers but while this affects the entertainment aspects of TV, the news is still very much controlled by the owners.
The most popular "one to one" medium has always been the telephone, familiar for a hundred years as a means to both speak and respond. In our early telephone experiences, the format could also be "many to many" on rural connections where several neighbours could join in one general conversation. While books, newspapers, radio and television were one-way communicators, we always had the opportunity to express our own opinions on the party line.
The Internet, however, has provided the first and only formalized "many to many" means of communication. London's Hyde Park public gatherings come to mind, where someone has the soap box but everyone within hearing distance also gets to express his opinion. Depending upon whether one is using e-mail, newsgroups, or a site of one's own on the World Wide Web, it's a matter of choice whether the message will go from one to one, from one to many, from many to one, or from many to many. Wide open to the world and indexed by search engines, whatever we post will likely be read by someone, and is accessible to everyone at any later date.
Effective interaction is achieved in the World Wide Web chat rooms where messages and instantaneous responses are posted for anyone who happens to be connected to share.
The availability of these human interactions on the Internet has greatly improved the lifestyles of countless seniors, especially those who are shut-ins and invalids or in retirement homes, whose interactivity with society had been limited almost entirely to being passive recipients.
Of even greater significance is that access to computers enables the older people in our society to influence decisions that require experience, a valuable step towards overcoming an omnipresent wisdom deficit.
Each of the many means of expression available on the Internet allows the sender to transmit thoughts in word form in real time. Fingers on the keyboard, trained to quick response, can hurl an idea into cyberspace before it is fully formed. Thinking on the fly supports the medium's apparent ephemeral quality. The inconsistency is that, though seemingly temporary and inconsequential, the message can be preserved forever if it happens to be picked up by someone's Web site or is on an archived news group.
Whatever can be extrapolated from random e-mail, quickly posted responses to discussion groups, fast repartee in chat rooms and impromptu Web sites, may or may not truly reflect reality. As spontaneity can engender honesty, these fast fed items may be more true to fact than the painfully rehashed and editor-polished words we see in bound books. The jury will never return on that question, as arguments on both sides are disputable.
In a paper entitled "Rationalism, Empiricism, and Virtual Reality," Dr. Peter Wegner, 70, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at Brown University, Rhode Island, likens the Internet to the cave in Plato's classic metaphor. He compares humans to cave dwellers who can observe only shadows of reality on the walls of their cave. This expresses the limitations of both people and computers in obtaining knowledge of the external world. The principle here is that projections of external worlds onto input sensors of human and computing agents are incomplete shadows from which the world cannot be reconstructed. Plato's cave is a metaphor for the abstraction that bridges philosophy, natural science, and computer science, according to Professor Wegner.
"Descartes' cogito ergo sum succinctly expresses the rationalist credo that the world can be modeled entirely by non-interactive processes of thought. Algorithms and rationalist models share a commitment to non-interactive modeling as restricted forms of computing that shut out the world while performing computations. They cannot adapt to changes during the process of computation, just as lecturers who read from a prepared non-interactive script cannot adapt to vibes from their audience. The pejorative statement that a person is acting like an automaton means he is executing an algorithm rather than behaving interactively."
Soon after joining the National Capital Freenet, I became a member of its first elected board of directors. Discovering some exclusive for-a-fee seniors' Web clubs in the U.S., I decided to establish a free and all-inclusive special interest group (SIG) for seniors on NCF, open to the world. Obtaining much needed technical advice from Dr. Warren Thorngate, in Carleton University's Psychology Department, I also set up discussion groups for three local newspapers; The Hill Times, the newspaper of Parliament, Ottawa X Press, arts and entertainment weekly, and THE EQUITY, the rural paper of Pontiac County, Quebec.
Using the Internet, even within the limits of what was available at Freenet, was so fascinating, that I decided to make it easier for others to get involved. In 1995, I co-authored a little book, Freenet for the Fun of It, with Internet columnist Pierre Bourque, who went on to build his highly successful NewsWatch Web site. Our expanded edition, published the following year by Stoddart Publishers, included freenets which had meanwhile been opened to the public all across Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia.
As soon as the World Wide Web came into being, I sought out instructions for Berners-Lee's brilliant hypertext markup language and expedited the launching of Web sites for the three newspapers with which I was affiliated. These were rough early attempts but a groundbreaking undertaking at the time. As their Internet presence has evolved over the years, hundreds of other newspapers around the world have also taken up residence on the World Wide Web, but we were among the first.
For the first Canadian Community Network Conference, held at Carleton University, I organized a news system so groups across Canada could know what was being discussed and decided by their delegates here in Ottawa. It was an experiment in what then was a very new medium, to find out how to provide such a service and to demonstrate its usefulness. We named ourselves "Real Time Online."
Recruiting a team of ten people, mostly from our Seniors Interest Group, we had seven reporters, two translators and a dispatcher. The reporters took notes in rotation, covering every session for the entire three days. They filed their stories on computers provided for our project by the University. Each story was then translated and e-mailed in both official languages to our dispatcher. From his office in the Public Library down town, he redirected the stories immediately to his list of Freenet reps across Canada. This was all happening as the conference unrolled, so the report of one session would be going out before the next session was over.
Instant feedback was available online from across the country. My expectations about seniors, volunteers, and the Internet, all proved to be correct; Real Time Online was a successful experiment!
Over time, journalism on the Internet has become commonplace, but during those first few years it was a dicey innovation. When the Internet first began to be a part of our daily lives, it was rumoured that newspapers, radio, and television would lose their grip as the main purveyors of news. This was reminiscent of an earlier fear, at the onset of television, that radio would disappear as a consequence. The only news source that noticeably lost prominence to television was the Pathé News which used to bring us to the scene of world events between the feature and the cartoon in movie theatres. The radio broadcast industry¹s concern with losing listeners followed an earlier concern of the print media, that with radio disseminating news all day it would no longer be necessary to buy a newspaper.
A demonstration television set had been the biggest attraction at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Having bicycled down to the Fair from Montreal we could hardly believe our eyes when, pedaling past the display, we saw ourselves on the little oval screen. Ten years later approximately one million Americans had television sets in their homes. The future of radio has frequently been considered tenuous. By 1948, Harold Wolff wrote in The New Republic that most experts were predicting television would "knock the pins out from under radio." Radio did not go away, it just regrouped, adapting to the new competition with top-40 music and news-talk formats, local news and community involvement replacing distant network programs.
When television leaped into the business of seeking and disseminating news, newspapers and magazines felt endangered. They, too, have survived, still playing a distinct role in our daily lives. People who get the paper only to do the crossword puzzles can now do them online, though this method is not as convenient as the traditional pen on paper. Some of the other reasons for reading a newspaper, such as stock quotations, sports, classified ada. the comics, headline news and even in-depth news coverage, can also be accommodated easily online.
Despite all this, newspapers survive, even though regular radio listeners and TV watchers know all the news before the paper arrives at the door. For some people, especially those who grew up before electronic media, the news becomes real only when they see it in print. "When I read it in THE EQUITY I know it really happened," is a frequently heard accolade around Pontiac County, Quebec. Community newspaper readers are loyal and the responsibility of editors and publishers is awesome. As editor of THE EQUITY for 32 years, I was also reading County news over the radio in Hull, Ottawa, Renfrew, Pembroke and Fort Coulonge, and producing regular TV shows about County affairs, but the local news always needed to be validated by appearing on the pages of the newspaper.
While radio, television and the newspapers have adapted to the presence of the Internet, the postal service has also made a few changes. Canada Post Corporation has inaugurated epost in partnership with the Bank of Montreal and TELUS Corporation. Recognizing that changing environments require changing solutions, they created an electronic mailbox where customers can receive and pay their bills from a growing list of companies. Such friendly interactivity, a simple thing like paying a bill, enables people with ailments or disabilities to regain charge of themselves instead of relying on others. For some of the old people who had lost this autonomy, such a simple solution can bring a significant improvement in the quality of their lives.
Internet services also evolve continually as innovations are brought into the system. Dominating in the fields of correspondence and information retrieval, the Internet has also been taken on by commerce in a big way. Old established companies and new made-for-the-Net ones offer products and services using secure access systems. Buying, selling, banking, trading, and bidding are all available on the Internet, along with dating, betting, gambling, counseling and new services every day as the potential uses of the Internet multiply.
Dissemination of news on the Internet will expand as other mass media continue the trend to diminish their local neighbourhood services. As long as it is still possible for individuals to post what they see, the opportunity for an unofficial, unprofessional type of journalism will flourish. As long as authenticity of sources can not be assured, computer mediated news will always be suspect, but the Internet will also continue to carry stories initiated by conventional media.
Differentiating is the responsibility of the reader.
Awareness of who writes and who controls the news will always determine what we will trust. Technological changes happen with great speed, so one's loyalty can change overnight. As new competitors enter the market, the Internet will need to adapt, as have newspapers, radio and television, and many of the old folks of today will still be around to help determine and witness what happens next.
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