Net salvation

[Steve Hoffman]

Lest we forget what this access can mean to folks.....

=============================

Finding Liberation in Cyberspace

Ella Veres 
NY Times 4/30/98


BUDAPEST -- For me, the Internet is paradise. It is as if I am
sitting at a table full of appetizing foods after suffering from
chronic starvation. Or as if I am a beggar who finds herself in a
department store that, incomprehensibly, gives out everything for
free. When I surf the Web, it is as if I am going around with my
shopping cart, piling it up with all the bounty that I was deprived
of for so long. 

I suspect my experience in getting on line from this part of the
planet is different from what prevails in the United States. For
example, whenever I have peeped into American chat rooms, I have
found complaints about too much data. For me that is not a problem. I
love the glut of information and I wallow in it because in a very
real way, it has been the computer and the Internet that have made me
free. 

I am a freelance journalist and writer. When I came to Budapest from
my native Romania six years ago on a fellowship to study American
civilization, I had hardly seen a computer. They were not accessible
at home. Here at the university, I was able to take a class in
computer basics. 

In the beginning, the lab in my residence was not particularly
appealing. It was littered with old soda cans, and most of the
keyboards had malfunctioning keys. I was apprehensive as I watched
many colleagues spend much of their time in front of a computer
screen, playing games or flirting with unseen correspondents. I
feared that I might become another flat-bottomed zombie. But at the
same time I was fascinated by the possibilities, and I persevered. 

After suffering through the early frustrations of losing files and
learning to control the mouse, I have become so attached to my
keyboard, mouse and screen that my fellow students now refer to me
as the Graphomaniac. I think the term connotes some respect. I
certainly do not feel any shame for spending as much as 14 hours a
day at the keyboard; in the last two years, I have produced a
roman-fleuve, in addition to term papers, plays and journalism
articles. 

After I learned how to use search engines and E-mail, I was quickly
dragged into Marshall McLuhan's "global subconscious" and became
mesmerized by the Internet's possibilities. I often forgot to eat,
sleep or attend drab lectures. I cut down on noncyber socializing.
To communicate instantly with someone far away was exhilarating, all
the more so since I came from a part of the world where, before 1989,
letters were routinely censored; seldom would one from abroad even
reach you. Now, at the touch of a key, I could be an insider, au
courant on subjects from Pampers to Cubism. 

Suddenly I had access to information that I had never known existed.
It was like a fairy tale. I registered for news groups and learned
how I could instantly find experts who could answer any question I
could pose. 

For a time in the beginning, however, I grew paranoid, thinking that
hooking into the cyberworld was akin to opening your door in the
middle of the night to an unknown caller. I remember one spooky
fantasy in which I was tormented by fears that somehow the
emanations coming through the computer screen would hurt my child. 

For someone who grew up in a Transylvanian village under the
Ceausescu regime, such metaphors come naturally. Who knew who was
lurking out there -- miscreants, crooks, evildoers of all kinds? Yet
my relative isolation offered some security. After all, most of my
correspondents had addresses in America, and the Atlantic Ocean
provided a comforting moat. 

As my dialogues widened, the fears vanished. I ventured farther, and
every step paid off. No longer did I long for books that the
libraries did not contain. I didn't have the money to order them,
but with E-mail I was able to find kind and generous people who would
send me books. Call it Internet begging, but it served me well. Or
if no one helped me with a book itself, I could type a word and,
boom, loads of pages related to my interest could be summoned to my
screen. 

In this way, I was able to write my thesis on New Journalism in
America in less than three months, amazing my aging professor with
the quality of the information I had gathered. He said that a decade
earlier students drudged for at least a year jotting down scraps of
material in dusty libraries, cursing the lack of books. 

At the same time, my fiction-writing efforts, all in English,
erupted, primarily because of my E-mail pals. It was similar to
telling the story of your life to total strangers on a train, only
you weren't limited to those sitting in your compartment. From these
E-mail correspondences grew my first, as yet unpublished, novel. I
assume that by now, other writers have used this method. Still, even
if I do not end up claiming the invention of a literary form, I am
grateful to E-mail for harnessing my imagination and to the Web for
providing me with my own bit of cyberspace: a Web site. 

Among other things, I thought a Web site would let me avenge myself
on the Hungarian-, Romanian- and English-language newspapers and
magazines that had seen fit to run my articles in trimmed or even
eviscerated form. With a Web site, I could post the articles as I
wrote them, with the hope that somebody would notice them. 

A single mother like myself who earned what I earned through
journalism in Hungary would, under normal circumstances, be
foolishly extravagant to think of having a home page. 

But I was given an internship at Radio Free Europe in Prague, where
I was taught HTML, a programming language for Web sites, and obtained
cybercitizenship for free. I have my own page. It is one of
millions. It is modest as such pages go. But I am there. 

When I first got my own piece of cyberspace, I joyously thought: "I
am free now. No one can confine me anymore. Farewell editors, visas,
borders. I am free and people will hear what I have to say because I
have something to say." 

Well, it isn't quite like that, but almost. For one thing, I still
have not figured out how to make money out of all the writing. But I
am working on it. Now as I hunt for work assignments in the United
States and for fellowships or internships, I don't carry or send
portfolios by costly snail mail. I just suggest a visit to my Web
site. At the very least, I have already saved money on paper and
photocopying expenses that can now be spent for toys or ice cream
for my son. 

I realize that in some circles, my blatant careerism may be
considered vulgar or unseemly, but I also think that allowances must
be made in the case of a Transylvanian woman who spent her
adolescence watching movies and wondering how she was ever to escape
a picturesque but oppressive life that seemed to offer just two
possibilities: teaching at a primary school in a rustic landscape of
muddy roads, gaunt faces and boozy bumpkins, or being buried alive
in a dusty small town where nothing was ever likely to happen. 

The Internet offered escape and, perhaps, salvation. Thanks to it, I
found out about creative-writing graduate programs that did not
exist in Eastern Europe. I rushed to apply to 11 American
universities. A good many have accepted me, and while the problem of
finding ways to pay for such blessings has not yet been solved, the
Internet has yielded ideas about where to seek financial resources. 

By now I have realized that there is nothing at all to be afraid of,
and maybe one day, if I am lucky enough to make my way to one of
those universities, I, too, will be complaining about being
overwhelmed by all the available information. But right now, like
someone who still remembers an old hunger, I will take every byte I
can get. 

Thank you very much. 

copyright 1998 The New York Times Company



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