Let me tell you a cute story. There was a girl and a guy who were very far apart. Then one day, this lady met this fellow on the web and they fell in love and finally met and got married and lived happily ever after_ blah blah blah. E-mail romance is a tired Internet story.
But this whole virtual community thing has changed relationships a lot. What about after "the happily ever after"? What about the Internet family?
Families have changed in the very short time that the Internet has been cooler than Cool Whip. Take my own family for example.
First off, let me tell you that while I may be a Wirehead, no one else in my family claims to be one. My parents may use computers at work, but they're not computer scientists. My fifteen year-old sister has left all the toasters in the house in one piece. It was always my job to take them apart, anyway.
Since I convinced my father to get a dial-up connection to the Internet, their lives have changed significantly. Now, my sister spends a couple of hours online, chatting with people about music and whatever. My mother (Happy Birthday, Mom; I swear the card is in the mail!) is currently engaged in four simultaneous games of Net Scrabble from a server in South Africa. My father is the only person in the world that looks at my web page (http://netpressence.com/boulter) every day and surfs until 3 a.m.
The cats, well, their paws are too big to type, but they always know that someone to feed them can be found in front of the computer.
What's good about this is people are doing something more interactive with their spare time. While TV is great, you don't often learn something from it. Web surfing is a lot more interesting than channel surfing. My sister will know how to use the web before she gets to college, something many Bucknell students struggle to grasp and utilize today. I think I can confidently say that the TV tubes have even cooled a bit.
My signature on all my e-mail messages says that I created CRAYON, the newspaper service that I started here at Bucknell, because that's what most people on the net identify me with. My parents' signature attempts to take some credit as well. It says "Dick & Sue Boulter, Creators of the Creator of CRAYON."
My family's access to the Internet has changed the way I communicate with them as well. Internet access is included in my tuition. Long-distance phone calls are not. It's also easier to reach me that way. Most of the time, when I talk to my parents on the phone, it's because their computer is broken and they can't send e-mail to me.
That's our responsibility as Wireheads: to build these systems so any family member can use them and they can all find something they will like and find useful. When it doesn't work, fix it.
If you build it, they will come.
They have a global network of people to chat with, a million Scrabble games to play, and virtually limitless web sites to surf. What else could the Internet family need? Another phone line.