DATE: Tuesday, February 25, 1997            TAG: 9702250001

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A15  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: George Hebert 
                                            LENGTH:   51 lines

LAGGING BEHIND

When it comes to electronic living, some of us are too much out of it. And some of us are too much with it. That's how the communications marvels of these times are dividing people up, it seems to me as I read and listen and look around. Of course, a lot of folks seem to occupy a sane and happy middle ground, but it's the extremes that tell the most interesting story.

First, I know about myself and my own household and where we fall - as hi-tech stampedes past us - in the scale of participation. We're far over on the out-of-it end.

Not totally out, granted. We do have a phone-answering machine (for defense, not entirely successful against meal-time sales pitches). And I do use a computer to keep lists and to write letters as well as pieces like this.

Telephonically, we're lightyears away from what's available. We don't have Caller I.D. (for all the words I've written in support of this device for finding out who's on the other end of an unsolicited call). Nor do we have a wireless phone to carry around in a side pocket or pocketbook, nor a cordless house-phone with one of those pull-out antennae. Even in the case of our phone-answering widget, I'm not quite in gear, having made several botches of my attempts to call home (while out on some trip) and listen to messages recorded in our absence.

As for computer stuff, I find myself becoming more leery instead of less. Up to this writing, the Internet and all that WWW-dot-com lingo remain distant, mysteriously entangled galaxies. I know about e-mail only from hearsay. And I've yet to play any computer games (not even the solitaire that came installed on my PC).

Further, we don't have a video camera. Worse yet, in our firm placement among the technologically disadvantaged, we don't even have a VCR. We can't (actually have no inclination to) rent movies, or tape State of the Union speeches delivered over TV when we aren't home, or watch the old family movies my brother Bill has converted to electronic images and assembled in a video cassette.

I don't have any powerful defense for not fully embracing the brave new networks of microchipdom, just a general unease. Also, it's an unease occasionally made uneasier by stories of people living almost their whole lives glued to computer screens - and by occasional, directly observed evidence of all-out electronic commitment.

I think, for instance, of a recent episode in a movie theater where the drama on the big screen was disrupted for us when we heard a voice rising and falling with conversational intensity a row or two ahead. The source was quickly identified.

Right there, with empty seats stretching away on both sides, a solitary filmgoer was chatting away with someone in the outside world via flip-phone.

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu