THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 6, 1994 TAG: 9406040029
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARY REID BARROW, STAFF REPORT
DATELINE: 940606 LENGTH: Medium
``Mom,'' the message said. ``It's a beautiful morning. I love you.''
{REST} That's all it said. She had no particular news that morning, no questions to ask, no problems to discuss.
I didn't have anything particular on my mind that day either, so we didn't talk on the phone. Yet thanks to electronic mail, or e-mail, we still communicated.
My son, Gibbs, recently sent me, via e-mail, a short story he had been working on. He would never have printed the story out and mailed it to me in its rough form. Again thanks to that new communications highway out there, we were able to discuss the story in its formative stages.
Isabel is in graduate school at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and has access to Internet, the worldwide computer network, through the university. Gibbs, who is in business in Atlanta, has a personal computer and modem at home and belongs to CompuServe, another computer network.
And we talk a lot on e-mail, something I wouldn't have dreamed possible just a few years ago. Even my grandson Jake, a kindgergartener, will occasionally try to send me a message with the help of his mom.
Gibbs is a computer buff, but Isabel and I are interested in the computer only for what it can do for us. I don't talk the lingo. I choke when I try to say something like ``cyberspace,'' not sure whether I'm using it in the right context. Even ``e-mail'' doesn't roll off my tongue with ease. I prefer the word ``message.''
But whatever I think about the technical side of computers, I sure am happy sending and receiving messages to and from my kids.
You might think I'm saying that e-mail is an inexpensive way for families to stay in touch. I'm not. Although e-mail is cheaper than long distance, it's not a substitute for a phone call.
Nothing will replace the telephone in my mind. Isabel and I have a ``best friends'' designation with one of the long distance carriers because we keep the wires burning between Virginia Beach and Charlottesville.
But e-mail is another way for families who are spread out across the country to stay in touch. The messages my family sends back and forth really aren't like phone conversations at all. They might not even be worth a 29-cent stamp. (Though ``I love you,'' as short as it is, is worth everything.)
When I first was learning how to deal with Internet, I sent Gibbs a short message. ``Help, I'm lost on the information highway and I can't get off,'' I joked, feebly.
That prompted several quick idiotic messages back and forth about how Internet needs an emergency button like the red one you can punch if you're stuck on the elevator or someone cruising the information highway like the Motorist Assistance Vehicle on the expressway.
One day, Isabel sent me an article on little kids' thoughts about love that had been making the rounds among her friends in graduate school. Another time, knowing how much I like cats, Gibbs passed on to me an e-mail message he had received on cat humor.
You get the picture. E-mail messages are more like a hybrid of our familiar forms of communication. They are like a three-way cross among a mundane chat between folks living in the same household, a letter and a phone conversation.
E-mail is the vehicle for thoughts we would not even remember to talk about over the telephone, or maybe not even take the trouble of mailing. In the process, though, we learn a little more about each other's lives that wouldn't be high on a list of priorities for other forms of communication.
I discover that it's a beautiful day, for example. Or I learn that Jake got a haircut or that Gibbs is holding a garage sale - unimportant, little things like that.
Funny, isn't it? E-mail allows us to communicate around the world with folks we'll never meet, whose names we'll never know. Yet at the same time it also adds another dimension to the closest of relationships.
by CNB