Students Live Lives in an Internet Incubator

By Adam Kirsch '97

Special to the Gazette

Imagine Al Gore's dream come true: a world where everyone has free, automatic Internet access in their homes through a high-speed connection right below the phone jack, where having a Web home page is de rigueur and where e-mail is as commonplace as "snail mail" and the telephone.

There is one place where all of this is real, even taken for granted: college campuses. For a whole generation of students -- since about 1992 -- the Internet has been a basic part of college life, as much as bunk beds and bad food.

Here at Harvard, there's no monthly fee or online charge. Any student can go to the basement of the Science Center and open an account. Terminals are available 24 hours a day in most dormitories, the student commons, and the Science Center.

As a result, Harvard -- like the hundreds of other campuses that offer free Internet access -- is the perfect test-market for Internet services. Cost and availability aren't factors, so the way students use the Internet gives a good idea of how the average consumer might use it, if and when it becomes cheap and universal.

Even under these ideal conditions, however, there are some functions that most students simply don't want the Internet to serve. Here is a guide to one student's experience with the Net -- what it can do well, and what it shouldn't try to do at all.

E-mail: If there's one thing about the Internet that even the most technophobic English major can learn to love, it's e-mail. I know at least one senior who avoided the Internet like a plague until her last semester of college, only to rack up a hundred messages between February and May. Most students check their messages daily, and the truly well-connected will log in half a dozen times a day, whenever they come across a free terminal. Thanks to the presence of the Net on most college campuses, it's now easier than in years past to hold on to those superficial high school friendships -- occasional e-mail updates can unite people who wouldn't have enough to say to one another in a real letter.

By the same token, however, e-mail is not the medium of choice for serious discussions between close friends. Something about sitting in front of a terminal in one's spare minutes isn't conducive to thoughtful, well-written correspondence. As I know from overhearing my roommate's many hourlong chats with his girlfriend at Brown, students still prefer the telephone for a heart-to-heart, despite the potential for an enormous bill at the end of the month.

Home Pages: Not quite as ubiquitous as e-mail, but still popular, the home page is a useless but fun hobby for a growing number of students. The software and server space for home pages is free, and the more computer-literate among us are happy to put up a little flag in cyberspace, listing favorite books, songs, or classes. It's rare that a home page is of interest to anyone but the creator's friends, but looking through the Harvard directory is good for an hour or two of gossipy entertainment -- the computer equivalent of scanning the student "facebook." But creating a page requires significantly more time and effort than just doing e-mail, and the advantages aren't as great. Just as there will always be a market for ham radio among hobbyists, so the personalized home page will probably catch on among some devoted loyalists; but the majority of Net users will most likely stick to simple e-mail.

World Wide Web: At this early stage, the Web is still enough of a novelty to be worth an evening of browsing -- racing through hypertext links, like channel-surfing on TV, is a pleasant distraction. But it doesn't take very long to realize that 90 percent of what's on the Web is advertisements, and once the novelty wears off, there's not much excitement in visiting the Ford or Sony home page. The only thing on the Web that my roommates and I regularly use are the movie listings at "www.boston.com." Unless and until the Web changes into a real entertainment medium, a combination of music, TV, and movies, it probably won't hold the average student's attention for very long.

Information: Perhaps the biggest surprise about the Internet on campus is that it hasn't gone further in replacing the old-fashioned library as a source of information and a research tool. The Harvard library's computer catalog, HOLLIS, is available over the Net, but most students will still trek over to the library to use a terminal there. Likewise, the research rooms of Harvard's Widener and Lamont libraries have yet to be deserted in favor of online encyclopedias.

This is partially due to the technological limitations of the Net: even with an Ethernet link, heavy usage on the network can make it excruciatingly slow to handle large amounts of data. Another factor is the superiority of paper to LED as a text medium; the flicker and scrolling of the screen is bound to give you a headache after a while.

But even more important than these technical considerations is the simple fact that most people continue to prefer real space to cyberspace.

Even if it were as easy and painless to download a book as it is to check it out of the library, one would miss the chance meetings in the library, the aesthetic experience of the building, the exercise of walking there and back. All the physical and social aspects of life -- whether it's going to the library, buying a newspaper, or talking on the phone -- are sacrificed on the Net. Not surprisingly, these are just what the stereotypical "computer nerd" has always valued least.

But the majority of the population, here at Harvard and probably in the world at large, will not want to replace real experiences, even tedious ones, with their Internet equivalent. If there's one things that Harvard's experience with the Net shows, it's that the allure of cyberspace is limited -- even when you get it for free.

Adam Kirsch is a junior studying English at Harvard College. He is the arts editor of the Harvard Crimson.