ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 12, 1996 TAG: 9612120001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: BETH MACY
SOURCE: BETH MACY
It's allowed one man to write a novel, another to reconnect with a brother he hadn't seen in 47 years.
A mother finally learned how to program her VCR, thanks to an e-mail from her 23-year-old college student son - living in Madrid, Spain.
Another woman, Blacksburg's BC Brandt, got so absorbed in her on-line work and friendships that she developed carpal tunnel syndrome.
And where did she find help from a support group? On-line, of course.
``That's a little like meeting at the top of the First Union Tower to discuss your vertigo, but it worked for us,'' Brandt wrote, adding an :> - that's a sideways smile in cybershorthand - for emphasis.
A month ago, I wrote about reconnecting with an old college friend I hadn't seen in 10 years, via the World Wide Web - a service I'd previously bashed as being Life Lite, not to mention about as useful as a maxed-out credit card at Christmas.
Since then, I've not only visited face-to-face with my friend Greg: We've become regular e-mail correspondents, exchanging recipes, jokes and generally goofing our way into a renewed friendship, all made possible by a chance message sent over the Web.
Dozens of you e-mailed to share similar stories, while others called to ask specifically how and where I bumped into Greg in cyberspace (more on that later).
As Troutville's Tom Atkins describes, ``Much of the net is incomplete, frustrating and laboriously slow, but when it comes to bringing together people who are far away both in terms of distance and their place in society, there has not been such a great leveler of society since the printing press.''
A year ago Atkins began research for a novel that interweaves elements of the Arthurian legends, but had a hard time finding information locally. Using the Internet, he was able to locate sources quickly and at minimal cost.
``More importantly, I have been able to actually get to know Arthurian scholars from California to Nova Scotia to Great Britain. I can bounce ideas off them and generate interest in my project among people I might have never known otherwise - all from my 175-year-old farm house in Troutville.''
Roanoke's Iva Ferguson, who lives in a six-computer household, says the Internet helps her entire family. Her 14-year-old peruses it for career information. Her 6-year-old recently found fame when her first-grade class at Fishburn Elementary posted students' pictures on their home page.
``The problem was that in the picture she had her arm around a fellow she is especially fond of and she was embarrassed that the `whole world' was going to see,'' Ferguson says. ``The thought of the little first-grader in North Carolina being suspended from school for kissing a girl on the cheek was what worried her because she had her arm around her friend in the picture!''
The girl didn't sleep well until Mom thought to check the picture out with her - and they jointly decided it wasn't as bad as she'd thought.
``The thing I like best about e-mail is that it's not so presumptuous or intrusive as the phone,'' Ferguson adds. ``Nine times out of 10 when my phone rings I'm sleeping or bathing children or putting children to bed or cooking or washing dishes. With e-mail I can answer it whenever I feel like it,'' usually once a week.
Ferguson and others found e-mail particularly useful for reconnecting with old buddies. After corresponding with an old college roommate on the Web, she's planning a face-to-face get-together - for the first time in 10 years.
Christiansburg's Mort Gilmore has a similar reunion story, only it involves his long-lost brother, Dan. Explains Mort's daughter-in-law, Janet Gilmore: ``After Mort graduated from high school in Radford, the family moved back to Media, Penn. Shortly thereafter, his father died of a heart attack at age 43,'' followed by the mother's death of cancer a few years later.
``The family dispersed, with Mort moving back to Radford and Dan going on to attend the University of Pennsylvania before serving some 30 years in the military. Over time the two brothers lost touch with each other - a separation that lasted 47 years!''
This April, Dan bought a phone-directory program for his computer and began searching for his brother. ``With some persistence and luck, he finally tracked Mort down and placed a LONG overdue and very emotional phone call!'' The call was followed by a reunion, then additional visits and, now, weekly phone conversations.
Covington's Anne Dean was wandering around the Web last month when she came across an international page with message boards from around the world, including Micronesia. On a whim, she posted a message asking for information about an old friend named Joe, an exchange student she'd known in high school in 1972. The two had kept in touch by mail for a few years after Joe's return to Micronesia in 1974, but eventually they'd lost touch.
The day after she posted the message, a reply came from a friend of Joe's. Several exchanges later, Dean learned that Joe now works for the Environmental Protection Agency on Chuuk. He doesn't have e-mail, but the friend furnished Dean with Joe's street address, where she promptly addressed her next letter.
``We live on such a huge planet,'' Dean says. ``Yet I guess with access to cyberspace, the world is at our fingertips, as long as you're in the right place at the right time.''
Salem's Emily Paine Brady writes not just of maintaining friendships via the Internet, but also of obtaining complex technical information - such as how to program her VCR.
Two years ago, Brady's son Erik corresponded electronically from Madrid, where he spent his third year as a University of Virginia student. Erik coordinated the university's Internet site there to earn spending money.
He also sent his mom explicit instructions on how to set various timers and recording devices to capture shows airing in Roanoke. Imagine, Brady summarizes, ``the chilling day when your infant zips past you, making you feel like some relic from the Bronze Age: You're kind of proud, but also humbled.''
And speaking of feeling like a cave person ... It's hard not to, compared with surf-savvy BC Brandt, the carpal-tunnel keyboarder. Brandt describes herself as someone who ``lives on-line.''
A Hollins College graduate, Brandt met her best friend - and scads of other friends - while ``role playing'' on-line. She describes it as ``part writing, part improv acting. ... You create characters, like in a book or movie, and act them out live on-line with other people, and co-write ongoing story lines.''
While Brandt concedes that some people take the Internet hobby too far - blurring fantasy with reality - ``most of us still have outside lives with jobs, children, families, pets, hobbies, beliefs and things that don't have modems or off switches.''
Brandt even turned her hobby of browsing an on-line music area into a full-time job. She now manages a music messaging site called the Nightclub for America On-Line.
The Web has also helped her connect with long-distance family members and old friends. When her cats died, she found comfort through her keyboard by communicating with other pet owners.
``It's a living, breathing city that can't really be compared to anything that's come before it,'' she says.
I had to ask Brandt how a person goes about reconnecting with an old friend over the Internet - more than a few readers wanted to know exactly how I'd done it. The problem was, the day I found Greg, I was so excited I didn't pay attention to the name of the Web site I'd stumbled across.
Brandt, the consummate expert, came through with a few suggestions for finding e-mail addresses. Try these sites:
http://www.yahoo.com/search/people/email.html
http://www.switchboard.com/
LENGTH: Long : 135 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: 2 illustrations by Robert Luunsford. color.by CNB