Isolated in the Information Age

I fell in love last year. It was a strange kind of love. With a woman, yes. She lived in Dunster House. I saw her often. Too often. The sight of her made me shudder. Her touch made me cringe. She had a shrill voice--her vowels sounded like the moan of a dolphin, her consonants vaguely like a knife scratching against a china plate.

But her e-mails! O, her e-mails! Were Shakespeare logged on to America Online, he wouldn't send his lover such wonderful messages. She knew when to capitalize her "I"s and when to leave them small. She picked the perfect moments to add an ellipsis for ironic effect. She struck a perfect balance between flippancy and thoughtfulness, so I knew that she had been checking her e-mail just as a study break, but nevertheless she remembered me. In each e-mail, she managed to describe her day's activities colorfully, paint each person involved vividly and never bored me.

Though she always bored me over dinner. In fact, I remember the moment when I admitted to myself that I loved her only through e-mail, and couldn't stand to be around her any other way. Then I knew I was in a morally indefensible relationship. It was time to move on.

Does this cyber-tale contain a moral about anything other than my possible hang-ups about women? I'm not sure...so let me relate another story.

Loaded down with too many heavy-duty courses about obscure topics with lengthy term papers, I decided a little late in the semester that I would indulge my Core tooth. I walked into Sanders Theatre to attend the fourth lecture of a certain well-known Harvard gut which shall remain nameless...well, okay--it rhymes with Gyros, pronounced correctly. Anyway, amid the post-lecture melee, I approached the head TF.

"I'm just joining the class now," I began, "and I need to be put into a sect--"

"Don't speak," she said before I could finish my sentence, and she put her hand up dramatically like Dianne Wiest in "Bullets over Broadway." "Don't tell me anything!"

"But you...you're the...head TF," I stammered.

"Telling me anything about your problem won't do any good." And then she scrawled something on a sheet of paper, and handed it to me: "headtf@fas.harvard.edu."

"Put it in an e-mail," she said tersely, and turned to the next blank face waiting for help.

These anecdotes are indications that the apocalypse is upon us. Technology has always palpably changed human relationships, for better and for worse. We can imagine the closeness and joy an elderly Eastern European babushka must have felt in the early 20th century when she used a telephone for the first time, and heard the chirping words of her grandchild coming over the wire from the New World. We can lament the suburban neighborhoods that grew quiet when television held post-war children in the living room in the hours when they used to play Kick the Can. We can relax as planes, trains and automobiles zip us around the shrinking world--Boston today, New York tomorrow, Sri Lanka the next. We can both love and hate voice mail, call waiting, cell phones, car phones, beepers--they always keep us in touch, but they never leave us alone.

Yet it seems that technology today keeps us away from others more often than it brings us together. For every person who, thanks to e-mail, can keep in touch with her friend in Nairobi, there is someone else who, thanks to e-mail, talks to his roommate over the computer instead of face-to-face, or who buys books at Amazon.com instead of from the funny old man at the corner bookshop. Even stalkers don't bother to go to the object of their infatuation's house anymore. Why get dirty rifling through someone's garbage when you can monitor her e-mail activity instead?

Take cybersex. Happily, I have no personal anecdotes about it, but what could be more of a perversion of human interaction? A mouse, a chat room and a bunch of pixelated images of naked women is hardly an adequate substitute for the most life-affirming and unifying act two people can engage in. Of course, those who frequent cybersex are probably the same people who 200 years ago would have frequented a brothel. Most of us, I think, don't fall into that category. But nevertheless it is indicative of the larger problem--fiber-optic wires are taking the place of flesh.

I don't mean to naysay progress in an attempt to protect the "old ways." Nor am I certain that today's technology boom represents the end of some process by which we will all become cut off from one another. The changes technology demands in our time may be of no greater magnitude than at any other time.

But maybe--just maybe--there is something uniquely powerful and isolating about the technological advances of our era.

If you pass me on the street and want to tell me that what I've written here are the ravings of a technophobic, millennialist kook, don't speak! Send me an e-mail.

Marshall I. Lewy '99-'00 is a history and literature concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.