Programmed for Life and Death by: John Markoff This spring a California man symbolically took his life by using a computer program to seek out and destroy the contributions he had made over the years to a continuing electronic conversation run by a computer group called the Well. Several weeks later, he followed this "virtual" suicide by killing himself in the real world. Blair Newman had been one of the most active members of the Well, a five-year-old electronic community that is operated out of the offices of the Whole Earth Review, a publisher in Sausalito, Calif., with roots in the 1960's counterculture. Several thousand people in the Bay Area regularly use their computers to call up the Well for an electronic, typewritten chat, and they frequently meet face to face in more conventional gatherings. Mr. Newman, a 43-year-old veteran of the personal computer industry, was such an enthusiastic - some would say obsessive - user of the Well that many of his friends knew him only electronically. They describe him as a flamboyant insomniac who could be counted on for stimulating and sometimes infuriating late-night conversation. But he was also known for bouts of depression. After his simulated suicide in May, many members of the community dispatched angry messages complaining that they had been wronged. Some believed that Mr. Newman's writings, stored on a computer disk, were the property of the community and not his to destroy. It was after this dispute, which lingered for several weeks, that Mr. Newman took his life. "For him to be done in the virtual world was to be done - period," said John Perry Barlow, a participant in the group who is a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. some may take Mr. Newman's story as that of a disturbed computer addict who used technology to withdraw from the world. But others see the experience in a different light, as a glimpse of a future in which computers change the way people live and work, and ultimately the way they die. In recent years computer networks have been emerging as a new kind of community unlimited by geography. While members can be spread across the world, the ease of communication can engender an intimacy more akin to a small 19th-century village than a 20th-century suburb. Some sociologists see a dark side to all this. "There is a notion of avoiding the here-and-now society," said Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. "Part of what's scary is that there is a blankness in here-and-now society that leads people to prefer these virtual communities." But others see the networks as a way to overcome the forced anonymity of modern life. While the telephone shrank the world by permitting instantaneous one-to-one contact, and while radio and television have served as a one-way medium to broadcast information to millions, the computer has become a vehicle that allows hundreds of people of like values and interests to come together in small groups. Much of what has taken place was foreshadowed in a number of science fiction novels written in the last 15 years. In his 1981 novel "True Names" - which has a small but devoted following among network enthusiasts - Vernor Vinge describes a fictional world in which a small computer underground illicitly occupies parts of a powerful global network. IN the story, technology has become so advanced that it is possible to stimulate highly realistic fantasy worlds and move about and interact with people who may be located thousands of miles away. A computer-science graduate student has recently created a less elaborate simulated universe called Tinymud, which exists within a nationwide computer network called Internet. A program permits dozens of people connected to the network through personal computers or work stations to create simulated personas and use them to explore a fantasy world that the players themselves constantly recreate. Similar to role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, the game lacks the dazzling graphics associated with Mr. Vinge's story. Tinymud's universe consists entirely of written descriptions, and wandering through it is like reading a novel - or like being a character in one. And in a meta-fictional twist, each player can also play author, adding new regions for other players to explore. IN recent months the game has become a fad on college campuses. By signing on to the network, one can travel through an interactive text filled with details of the geography of the Boston area, or electronically visit the Yale University campus. In addition to shrinking distances and stretching imaginations, computer networks also provide anonymity. Such an environment can lead to behaviour that would not be so readily tolerated in real life. Recently, in a posting on a computer network, a Wesleyan University student complained about sexual harassment in the Tinymud game. "Just because my character is female and has a vaguely attractive description, and just because I choose to flirt with some people, some jerk thinks my sexuality is public property," the student wrote. (It is not known whether the character's creator was male or female.) Someday electronic communities could be futuristic, high-tech paradises. But for now they function more as primitive societies, still groping for social codes. Mr. Barlow, the lyricist, said he once believed that computer conferences would never become real communities until they could address sex and death in ritual terms. "Marriages and funerals are the binding ceremonies in real towns," he said, "but they have a hard time happening among the disembodied." In the case of Mr. Newman, his friends have tried to assuage their grief by what may be the first electronic funeral. Shortly after his death, they created a new computer file including all of his old writings, which, it turns out, had been saved on a backup disk. They have also compiled a eulogy, hundreds of pages of testimonials available on the system. Included is this observation from Mitchell D. Kapor, the founder of the Lotus Development Corporation and now chairman of On Technology: "He was a unique character, and perhaps the limitations of space and time were just too much for someone with so many ideas and inspirations." ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The above article was found in the New York Times some time in November 1990, and brought to my attention by Victoria, of The Pinnacle Club BBS. It seems to me to have enough relevance to our situation, using Bulletin Boards in New Zealand, to be worth spending a little while typing it in. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bernadette Mooney - SysOp - The Pinnacle Club BBS - Auckland - New Zealand ----------------------------------------------------------------------------