Universal email access

[Steve Hoffman]

Studies Explore Possibilities of E-mail for Everyone

Rebecca Fairley Raney 
NY Times 4/11/98


In Minneapolis, Steven Clift makes a living wrangling 700 e-mail
messages a day. He subscribes to more than 100 discussion groups
with names like TownTalk and CyberTelecom, monitoring the chatter
about the possibilities of virtual communities. 

He sends the striking ideas he sees to the John & Mary R. Markle
Foundation in New York, a philanthropic organization that is
investing millions to explore the possibilities of a society that
provides e-mail for everyone. Clift is one of dozens of people the
foundation has put to work on the idea. 

In Santa Monica, C. Richard Neu and a staff of six at the Rand Corp.
sort through surveys of government employees, assessing their
impressions of the obstacles and benefits to providing Medicare and
unemployment insurance information to people by e-mail. 

Down the California coast, in San Diego, 50 executives from
companies including IBM and Starbucks gathered this week to ponder
big-picture questions about the impact of technology on society. Is
the Internet hype? Should computer literacy become part of the school
curriculum? Will innovators pose a risk to corporate America by
delivering their products on the Web? 

Major studies funded by the foundation started in 1994, and several
studies are still in progress. Researchers at Rand, Bellcore,
Carnegie Mellon University and the Brookings Institution have
explored the formation of friendships in cyberspace, community
development online and barriers to Internet use. So far, more than
$2 million has gone into the project. 

The objective is to create a national dialogue about universal
e-mail access, an idea predicated by findings of a Rand study that
said universal access will not happen without social intervention. 

"The goal is not to predict what will happen, but to encourage uses
to enhance a democratic society," said Zoe Baird, president of the
Markle Foundation. "Why be passive? We're hoping to have people
thoughtfully inspire uses." 

The research and the roundtables are geared to build that
inspiration. One of the early Rand studies showed a gap between the
"haves" and the "have-nots" in information society, and that the
disparities persisted despite the falling price of computers. The
thinking behind Markle's initiative goes that if the government and
corporate sectors provide better services online, the gap between
"haves" and "have-nots" will be more likely to close. 

"They're trying to prevent a society with an underclass," said
Catherine Gay, a principal in the International Advisory Group in
New York, a publishing company that is coordinating roundtables and
publicity for the foundation's universal e-mail project. 

Studies on the issue, funded by Markle, will continue to appear in
the next few months. Meanwhile, the foundation is sponsoring events
to keep people thinking.

In the most recent event, the corporate leaders forum in San Diego,
the goal was to touch influential people with ideas. The stage was
set with a hypothetical case study to work out how a traditional
company, a chain of record stores, should respond to a new company
that sells music online, and the discussion expanded to consider how
people would work, shop and live in a wired society. 

"The idea is to inoculate these people with social venture capital,"
said Jonathan I. Zemmol, a principal in the International Advisory
Group. The hope was that these 50 people would talk to 50 more
people, and that the word would spread. 

The participants came from traditional industries, like the steel
industry, and from Internet start-ups. Many were intrigued by the
notion that online communities can drive purchases. In other words,
get people talking about a product online, and more people will buy.
For Shabbir Safdar, a longtime Internet advocate who is now a
principal in Mindshare Internet Campaigns in Washington, D.C.,
seeing leaders of traditional industries considering online
communities was cathartic. 

"All it does for me is validate the medium," he said. 

The Markle project is encouraging government leaders to consider
online communities as well. Neu, a senior economist at Rand, is
investigating what it would take for agencies that administer
Medicare and California unemployment benefits to communicate with
people online. Medicare alone, he said, sends more than 500 million
notification letters to people a year. 

This study started after earlier findings in 1995 by Rand that
touted universal e-mail's potential benefits to society -- that
e-mail "might therefore lead to new social and political linkages
within U.S. society, reduce the feelings of alienation that many
individuals in the United States feel and give them a new sense of
'community,' revitalize the involvement of the common citizen in the
political process, etc., and in general strengthen the cohesion of
U.S. society," according to the study. 

"That became kind of a best-seller," Neu said of the study. "The
reaction was, well, cool, but where do we go from here?" 

One way, he said, is to get government agencies to offer essential
services by e-mail. "We say, 'Hi. We're from Rand,'" Neu said. "'We
want to find out if you can use e-mail.' When they gasp, we say,
'Why did they gasp?'"

The value of the study, he said, is to get the issues on the table.
The biggest barrier he has found so far is the agencies' lack of
ability to conduct secure online transactions on a large scale.
Ultimately, he argues, if several large government agencies, such as
Social Security and the Internal Revenue Service, need to conduct
secure online transactions, their business will be enough to drive
the market to create a way to do secure transactions on a large scale
-- a development that will enhance all types of e-mail use. 

As the foundation's efforts to inspire corporate and government
leaders continue, Clift is keeping an eye on the online communities
themselves. His experience in the area started several years ago as
the creator of a discussion group on Minnesota politics, and now he
spends half his day, every day, taking in the talk from listservs
around the world for the foundation. 

He said the value of listening to people on the Internet is immense;
the people who practice the craft of communicating online provide
great expertise. 

"Tapping what the Net is having to say for a foundation-supported
effort is very unique," Clift said. "Often, the people in the
audience know a lot." 

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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