Continuing on from my previous post, the third and final article on this floppy disk and on the subject of online encounters in the early 1980s is from the September 6, 1983 issue of 'The Village Voice' and is by Teresa Carpenter, a different author from the previous two articles. It is titled 'Reach Out and Access Someone'. It's amazing how something so completely taken for granted today was so deconstructed and analyzed when it was new...
Reach Out and Access Someone - Part 1
(This article is reprinted from the September 6, 1983, issue of 'The Village
Voice' with the permission of it's author, Teresa Carpenter.)
Las Vegas in the rain is about as cheerful as Guam. So last November when the
storms that swamped Malibu swept inland to pound the roof and glass siding of
the Hacienda Hotel, I spent a lot of time curled up under the covers
contemplating the Future.
The Future seemed a pressing issue just then because I was nominally covering
COMDEX, a biannual convention where makers of computer hardware and software
unveil their new lines in an atmosphere of matter-of-fact futurism. The truth
of the matter was that I was a bewildered observer tagging along behind my
spouse equivalent, Steven, who writes a column for 'Popular Computing', belongs
to a little cadre of technology writers who cover these events with the espirit
of prospectors in a new gold rush.
One afternoon early in the convention week we went to lunch with another
technology writer from 'Time' magazine. The two were swapping industry gossip
when Steven stopped, turned to me, and said, not unkindly, "You can add
something if you like." That made me so uncomfortable that I didn't return to
the convention. I strode off as if I had some pressing business to conduct,
played the slots a while, and ended up back at my room burrowed under the
covers to contemplate my place in this new order.
The technological cleft that had been opening between Steven and me went back to
the previous year when we had both gotten Apples for word processing. Buying
the computers was originally my idea. Once we got them home, we both learned
word processing. I learned it faster. But I stopped there, while Steven's
fascination with the technology impelled him to go further. He fussed with the
computer as if it were a beloved toy. He talked to people, read about
computers, wrote about them, and quietly became a lay expert.
My ignorance was most conspicuous in an area called "telecommunications" - that
is, using the computer to reach and talk to other people. It had not occurred
to me that I might ever want to do that until in perusing the small library in
Steven's suitcase I came across 'The Network Nation', written by a pair of
social theoreticians named Starr Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff. The book,
published in 1978, slightly preceded popular interest in computer technology and
didn't receive much attention. Yet it contained a fascinating vision. In it
home computers are as common as the telephone. They link person to person,
shrinking, as the authors put it, "time and distance barriers among people, and
between people and information, to near zero." In its simplest terms, 'The
Network Nation' is a place where thoughts are exchanged easily and
democratically, and intellect affords one more personal power than a pleasing
appearance does. Minorities and women compete on equal terms with white males,
and the elderly and handicapped are released from the confines of their
infirmities to skim the electronic terrain as swiftly as anyone else. What the
Network Nation promises is so sensible and humane that it leaves one embarrassed
to be living among contemporaries who take meetings.
Read the rest here: https://www.megalextoria.com/wordpress/index.php/2017/08/15/reach-out-and-access-someone-1983/
