Good Reasons To Cheer for The Internet
The Web Lets People Help Themselves and Others
By Leslie Walker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 6 1997; Page F15
The Washington Post
My Luddite friends (you remember Luddites, those anti-technology rebels who smashed factory textile looms in England at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution) are always complaining that the Internet is a gigantic time toilet. It wastes precious hours of your life, they say, flushing them away to a virtual world that lacks meaning or purpose.
Tacky and tangled though cyberspace may be, I disagree. We have only just begun to invent good uses for the Internet, even if we do have to hunt to find them. The network is about people helping people. It's about connections -- people connecting with information, with each other and with themselves.
Here are a few online trends from 1996 that kept me optimistic:
The people-locators. By now everybody knows there are giant global directories where you can look up phone numbers or ad\dresses, but do you know about the reunion sites? Adopted children and birth parents are registering at Web archives with hopes of making matches. BirthQuest and the World Wide Registry are two big ones.
People also are finding former classmates at high school and college reunion sites, which are especially helpful to military brats who attended overseas schools. Two such sites are the Defense Department Alumni Center and the World Alumni Net. The Reunion Network is broader, aimed at broken families, genealogy buffs and missing people.
The information-locators. While power-searching on keywords is still crude, people are starting to appreciate the value of instantly retrieving stuff from databases. Wasting time on the Web? Tell that to investors whose customized stock reports save them the time they once spent hunting through newspaper stock tables every morning.
More and more people whose loved ones are diagnosed with breast cancer, diabetes and other diseases are scouring medical Web sites to learn about causes and treatment. Medical Matrix and Martindale's Health Science Guide have vast repositories of links, while MediConsult is easy to use. There's even a medical research site for pets called NetVet.
One college professor I know loves Bartlett's Quotations online because it can retrieve a vaguely remembered phrase or sentence in an instant. Specialty search engines are another useful resource. Academics use Web-Cite's scholarly index to several thousand literary and cultural works, while women might want to visit WWWomen for its guided tours and female-oriented resources.
The Web enables you to look for more than text these days. Interpix Software Co.'s image-surfer performs topical searches for photographs and videos. Typing in "fish" produced 384 thumbnail photographs of underwater creatures (some boats, too.) Clicking on each produces the full image at the host site.
Self-discovery. You've probably seen CD-ROM IQ tests in computer stores, but did you know about online personality tests? College students get a kick out of analyzing their temperaments based on principles from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. You can try your own self-analysis at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Sunsite.
Personal services. While online commerce remains embryonic, personal service sites are popping up like dandelions. A colleague got door-to-door directions to a New Year's Eve party last week by filling out his address and the party's ad\dress at the Zip2 Web site. Zip's easy mapping service also helped his dad find a faster route from his Arlington home to his Alexandria office.
There are many minor helpers, including ones to remind you by e-mail of important dates. (Internet Reminder Service is one; E-minder is another.)
Thinking about relocating and wondering whether the higher cost of living will clobber you? Type in your present location and salary, plus where you want to move, and Home Fair's salary calculator tells you how much you need to stay even.
Perhaps the most widely used online service is travel planning, both to research a destination and to do advance bookings. Two big sites are Travelocity and Microsoft's Expedia. Tell Expedia what cities you're interested in and it sends you regular e-mail on airfare deals.
E-mail still No. 1. Did I mention e-mail again? It still reigns as the most popular Internet use. Many companies are scrambling to develop technology to protect the privacy of electronic messaging and online commerce.
You know e-mail has gone mainstream when Uncle Sam is developing an electronic postmark to time and date stamp e-mail. The U.S. Postal Service's 22-cents-per-message trial service is designed to guard against mail-tampering. It uses digital signatures and requires recipients to download free software to read the electronic postmark.
E-mail also is an important way that the Net connects strangers who share personal passions. A colleague who moved to a North Carolina beach for tranquillity used a Net search engine to find a computer program for tracking sunrises and moonrises. She wanted to know when to watch for the moon every night, but unfortunately hadn't a clue how to download a moonrise calculator program she found.
So she e-mailed the author, who turned out to be a Michigan dentist and fellow moon-lover. Through an exchange of nearly two dozen messages, he taught her about file compression, zippers, directories and technical vagaries that frustrate would-be Internet users. After she got his moonrise calculator up and running, they continued their electronic chatter about moonglades and similar night-sky topics.
No, they didn't marry, or even meet. But they connected in a way that mattered to them both. That's what keeps Net user coming back for more, despite the glut of irrelevancy and inanity that gets in the way.
Leslie Walker's e-mail address is walkerl@washpost.com.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company