Ahead of Ourselves By Denise Caruso Wall Street Journal, November 15, 1993; R27 When I hear people talk about the "information superhighway," I always flash on a scene from the movie "Repo Man." It's the part where Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton meet up with their archrivals, the Martinez brothers, and commence to play a high-speed game of chicken up and down the banks of the Los Angeles River aqueduct. That scene is a pretty accurate metaphor for what the on-line world is like: Although you usually seem to be getting somewhere, there's a good chance that you will crash before you reach your destination. And when you do manage to get there safely, you're not always sure what the fuss was about in the first place. Don't get me wrong: There isn't a shred of doubt in my mind that on-line information services and entertainment will eventually become a nearly invisible thread in the tapestry of human communication. Moreover, if you're willing to overlook the problems of hanging out in cyberspace, you can find yourself chatting it up with some of the strangest, most brilliant people imaginable, most of whom you will never see "F2F" (face to face), and all of whom seem to have little else to do but pour their formidable intelligence into oddball projects -- the results of which they post on the network for no other reason than to entertain their equally brainy peers. A few months ago, I received via e-mail an exhaustive, step-by-step instruction kit, created by a programmer, that spelled out how to use a high- powered computer workstation and laser printer to fax lunch orders to a nearby Mexican grocery. The message, titled "Ordering Burritos From My SPARC," begins: "Tired of standing in line at La Costena?" Another e-mailed gem was from a physicist who had mathematically calculated the temperature of heaven, based on data he found in biblical texts. Equally impressive was the work of the scholar who had translated two entire Rolling Stones songs, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Sympathy for the Devil," into Latin -- "Consensus cum Diabolo," and "Satisfactionem (Obtinere Nequeo), respectively -- and published the results on-line. Projects such as these take the kind of dedication to "better living through technology" that is found only among people who spend far too much time in front of a computer. Unfortunately, most of these folks are pretty cranky about the commercialization of cyberspace, and a lot of them aren't planning to stick around long enough to hasten the improvements that will make on- line networks so accessible to the mortal world. That means, for a while at least, that we're pretty much stuck with what we have. And despite the progress that has been made, trying to take advantage of today's information services is likely to be as disappointing as your first brush with that last victim of technology hype -- multimedia. Consider: SPEED IS RELATIVE. What's fast and easy from an on-line veteran's viewpoint is not necessarily fast and easy for those who have never ventured into cyberspace. Most people are used to pressing a button on a remote control and having the TV set immediately light up. Things on-line are a bit, well, slower. In my office, we got all excited recently about the announcement by one on- line service that it was going to provide digital movie trailers that you could download, or copy from their computer to yours, and watch in the comfort of your home or office. We blazed on-line and downloaded the trailer for "In the Line of Fire." The trailer took precisely 1.4 hours to download (as the system was kind enough to inform us in advance), tying up the phone line for the entire time. Then, we couldn't look at the trailer because of some unspecified "file error." We wasted another two or three hours on the process, every time with the same result. That's entertainment? WHAT IF NOBODY WANTS TO PLAY? A number of very smart people are touting the joys of "virtual communities," places where people are more "free to be, you and me," where they get their bodies out of the way and can communicate mind-to-mind. This state, they say, is achieved by using a computer and modem to "log on" and communicate via on-line services. But when does such a community turn into the "Rear Window" of the information age? Since the late '80s, I have been the den mother of a technology forum on a popular on-line network. The forum's activity level-- that is, how many messages are posted by members for everyone to read -- has ebbed and flowed for a variety of reasons. But there's always a large contingent of "lurkers," members who only read and don't post messages -- the cyber-equivalent of being in a room filled with people and eavesdropping on their intimate conversations. There's nothing wrong with voyeurism per se, but it begs the question of whether you can have a virtual community (or any other kind) when no one knows you're there. IT ISN'T EASY. While preparing for a meeting some months back, I logged on to a large information-retrieval service for some background. In theory, the system has pretty much everything I needed: Its database contains the full text and stories of almost every major metropolitan daily, as well as news wires from all over the world. But the system's interface -- what you look at on your screen while you're searching for information -- only marginally resembles English, and follows a logic patterns that's something less than Vulcan. After spending far too much time typing periods, then slashes, then periods and slashes, and still retrieving not one article I was looking for, I surrendered to customer service. IT ISN'T CHEAP. For all my floundering on the information service just mentioned, I received a bill for $200, even though it didn't yield a single article until I called for help. Beware the information service that charges by the hour: Its interface is often suspiciously opaque. YOU CAN LOSE IT ALL. The technology forum I lead has had some pretty fascinating postings over the years, and I've wanted to collect them all in one place. As a favor, the network compiled five years of older postings into a single text file and sent it to my electronic mailbox. Through a series of miscommunications, the file "timed out." In other words, it was automatically deleted after a certain date, disappearing from the system as if it had never existed. I had planned to compile the postings into a book some day. So much for those plans. PEOPLE CHANGE THEIR HABITS SLOWLY. One woman I know uses her on-line account only for textual "sexual" encounters. She is certainly not afraid of computers -- she has them all over her house. But I sent her e-mail more than a year ago and she has never considered retrieving it. No special reason. It's just that she never reads her e-mail. Now, how many people do you know who would leave a letter sitting in their mailbox, or messages on their answering machine, for a year? COMPUTERS AREN'T PERFECT. It is extraordinarily difficult to make large, complex interactive systems -- especially those that operate over public networks -- work without error 24 hours a day in perpetuity, and it takes a long time to troubleshoot them. As one high-technology executive said at a recent conference, "Software is hard." It takes many person-years to write good software that can operate a complex system, and many more to make it work sufficiently well that you can use it to connect millions of users who don't know how to fix it when it breaks. The examples of what happens when things go wrong are endless, and they range from minor hassles to systemwide catastrophes. A couple of weeks ago, I conned an author I know into sending me an electronic copy of an espionage story involving jellyfish that he had written with another author. It was a big file, and I started downloading it. About 5,000 words into it, random gibberish started cascading down the screen and, despite my wild effort to abort the process, continued to do so until I raced around to the back of my modem and unplugged it. Though I was pretty sure the problem had something to do with computers, the author's wife (having read the story) blamed it on the jellyfish. If you want an honest reality check on the perils of technology, there's a great place on the Internet called the "Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems," which is sponsored by an industry group's committee on computers and public policy. Working computer scientists and engineers use the forum to discuss what has gone wrong -- or might in the future. For example, a German professor recently posted a message about what happened to some Hamburg-based customers of Germany's new ISDN telephone system. ISDN, which stands for integrated services digital network, allows the transmission of all sorts of digitized communication -- voice, text, video, fax, data, etc. -- and it is being hailed by many as a giant first step toward activating the information superhighway. But according to the professor's message, about 25% of Hamburg's ISDN customers, most of which are businesses, were hit by a software bug in mid- September and were unable to use their telephone, fax and data services for almost 12 hours. And even when the system is working, the professor wrote, it is plagued with "broken calls, false connections, devices beeping for no rational reason, etc." Obviously, we'll never have a glitch-free world. But the question is whether people will overlook all of these on-line problems anytime soon, and start using on-line services instead of today's dominant modes of communication. It isn't an easy question to answer. But my guess is that it's safe to say we don't have to start putting our telephones into the closet as collector's items just yet; the on-line stuff is nowhere near ready for prime time. Creating a world where everyone has a place in the virtual community requires a deeply significant change in the social agenda, and is a daunting technical challenge as well. We don't care too much about it now, because we don't yet fully rely on the stuff. But if you think you get testy when the newspaper doesn't show up on time, just wait until all your information comes over the wires and the network goes down. Like avenging repo men, you will take to the streets, and God help the network provider that done you wrong. ------ MS. CARUSO IS EDITORIAL DIRECTOR OF FRIDAY HOLDINGS L.P.