From the perspective of students and scholars, network computer technology offers the most challenging transformation of life in the last decade. From the point of view of the general public, it could be argued that network technology might soon rival the telephone and the answer phone, the fax machine, newspapers and television and especially, ordinary postal services, if it is made available to all.
Everyone can now send or receive electronic mail (e-mail) provided that they are registered and have an address. The address includes the person's log in name, the country, the institution or nature of work and name of the local host network. A typical address would look like this for someone doing academic work at Edinburgh University: username@uk.ac.ed.castle
This address enables the user to receive e-mail from around the world and to send e-mail to anyone who uses the network. The network serves as a telephone when you give the 'talk' command which divides the screen into two - one for receiving written 'talk' from the other terminal and one for sending written 'talk'. If the other person is not logged on at that particular moment, the computer will let you know immediately. Then you can leave a message as on an answer phone by sending an ordinary e-mail to the person.
The advantage of the e-mail over the answer phone is that the chances of a user failing to read the message is reduced because every time the user logs on, the computer will prompt with the enthusiastic message, 'You have new mail.' The shortcoming of the talk command is that, unlike answer phone which could be left on while you pretend that you are away or too busy, an invitation to talk can come through while you are in the middle of an urgent essay. Of course, you can refuse the invitation but your friend or colleague would always know that you were there.
Such shortcomings are compensated for by the fact that the written 'talk' and the e-mail cost students absolutely nothing whereas telephone bills and the cost of postage could drive foreign students and visiting scholars into isolation from friends and family. This means that students and scholars could make fantastic savings by e-mailing their letters, essays, occasional poems, quotes from books, urgent information, questionnaires or copies of voluminous manuscripts that could cost a fortune through the usual post. Network technology has increased the amount of communication between students, friends, colleagues and family. As Stephen Hawkins would say, this is a welcome development because we must keep talking to avoid the danger of not talking.
Equally interesting are the network news (nn, standing for 'no news' is good news) services that are available on Internet (the international network). This is likely to seriously rival the dominance of the mass media over news. The advantage of 'nn' over both the print and the electronic media is that it is a combination of both. Already, there is an electronic publication called @ux(TeleTimes International) which is edited by a sixteen year old school boy in Canada. Writers, including Ph.D. holders and business executives, contribute well-informed articles from all over the world and readers can subscribe to @ux(TeleTimes) free of charge for the time being.
It is always exciting to read the news groups that are concerned with social and cultural, recreational, and miscellaneous issues. For example, misc.jobs.offered contains advertisements for jobs that might interest graduates, soc.culture.african provides a forum for the discussion of issues like football, female circumcision, political movements and the politics of race in Africa. Similarly, soc.feminism holds articles on sexual harassment, gender bias in advertising and feminist jurisprudence. Recreational news groups include rec.arts.poems, rec.music.reggae and rec.arts.cinema where readers catch up on gossip and chance upon some good quality posting. And misc.activism.progressive contains very serious articles from different leftist perspectives.
What is exciting about these articles is that the reader can respond immediately, line by line, and expect responses to his or her rejoinder. In this way, people who have never met get to know each other and even become friends or foes. Fortunately, the inclusion of articles in the news groups is moderated in such a way that offensive materials are edited out. But the moderators are not censors as such since they allow street language to surface in some of the exchanges that might appear rude while remaining light-hearted.
A key potential of the network computer technology is that it drags the carpet from the feet of dictators who would like to censor information and control the press. But this is an ambiguous potential in the sense that while the technology offers uncensored access to information, such information is accessible to dictators and the oppressed alike such that the later could be identified by the former through their posting. Similarly, the volume of information available on the network could be a form of control in disguise: it is so much that some people could get lost in the wilderness of facts, it is so much that distinguishing between the essential and the diversionary is not always easy.
Another disadvantage of the network is that computers are less accessible than newspapers, television sets, telephones and post offices. The advantage of the usual news media is that they have more experienced and better trained staff with following while network computers are not easily accessible to the general public. Furthermore, the cost of subscribing to network news agencies that are not publicly accessible is so high that most students and scholars would continue to rely on street-corner news agents for information.
Even in universities where computer facilities are available, some students prefer to write their essays by hand and keep their distance from computer labs while some universities make network facilities accessible only to research students. If (network) computers are made accessible to everyone or almost everyone as is the case with the usual postal services, the energy costs might be too much for the environment to absorb. There are already worries that personal computers contribute too much to global warming and it is likely that universal network computing would deepen the energy crisis.
A related problem is that exposure to the computer screen for too long at a time could damage health. Thus many readers prefer to print out copies of the articles that they would like to read. This increases the concern of environmentalists who argue that this is a double drain on the environment; first energy is used up in computing and posting articles, then paper is excessively utilised for reading them. The answer that network readers can offer to the problem of excessive paper consumption is to make articles short and precise to reduce the time required for reading and to make sure that they recycle all the papers that they do not need to keep.
- Biko Agozino, Edinburgh, Scotland
