_/_/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/_/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/ _/_/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/_/ _/_/_/_/_/ I n f o r m a t i o n, C o m m u n i c a t i o n, S u p p l y ------------- E l e c t r o Z i n e ------------------------------ ******************************************************************************** Established in 1993 by Deva Winblood Information Communication Supply Email To: ORG_ZINE@WSC.COLORADO.EDU _________________________________________ /=========================================\ | "Art helps us accept the human condition; | | technology changes it." | \ - D.B. Smith / \*************************************/ BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Information*Communication*Supply ElectroZine Staff, 93-94: Daniel Frederick; Russell Hutchison; Benjamin Price; Luke Miller; Donald Sanders; Matthew Thyer; Deva Winblood; Ted Sanders; Jeremy Bek; Jeremy Greene; Clint Thompson; Steven Peterson; Jason Manczur; Stephan Manzcur; and, [ICS Test Pilot] David Trosty. Faculty Advisor: George Sibley REDISTRIBUTION: If any part of this issue is copied or used elsewhere you must give credit to the author and indicate that the information came from ICS Electrozine ORG_ZINE@WSC.COLORADO.EDU. DISCLAIMER: The views represented herein do not necessarily represent the views of the editors of ICS. Contributors to ICS assume all responsibilities for ensuring that articles/submissions are not violating copyright laws and protections. |\__________________________________________________/| | \ / | | \ T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S / | | /________________________________________________\ | |------------------------------------------------------------------| | BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4| | | | Three Years Later -=- By George Sibley: Introductory essay | | from the ICS Faculty Advisor and Drum Major. | | | | E S S A Y S : | | | | The Friend I Never Met -=- By Bob Wilson: | | Notes On Electronic Faith | | | | Email Culture -=- By George Sibley: | | Part 1 - The Subversive Sweatshop | | Part 2 - Creating the Email Elite | | | | New Prejudices -=- By Steven Peterson: | | On Human Rights and Intercultural Citizenship | | | | Cyberspace: Gibsonian Mythology -=- By Deva Winblood: | | On Virtual (and other) Computer Realities | | | | N O N - F I C T I O N : | | | | Russian Scientists Seek Net Connections -=- By George Sibley | | | | Building A School Without Buildings -=- By Ken Blystone: | | On The Academy Virtual School of El Paso, Texas | | | | Computer-Mediated Communication -=- By Steven Peterson: | | Part 1 of a series; a social-psychological approach | | | | WorldNet Tour Guide -=- By Staff: Digital Freedom Network | | | | P O E M S : | | | | Two Poems -=- Heather Eliot | | The Map -=- Gayle Allenback | | Several Poems -=- Heather Eliot | | 2 (of 6) Poems -=- Stewart Carrington | | i wish i could write -=- Clint Thompson | | Women -=- JamiJo Tobey | | Eyes Of Love -=- Jason Manczur | | Walking Alone ... -=- Bob Wilson | | What Is Mine -=- Clint Thompson | | Introverted Psyche -=- Damian Riddle | | Enclave (3 Poems) -=- David Trosty | | Unneeded Technology -=- Andrew DeSplinter | | The Fate of Ethnic Diversity -=- David Trosty | | | | A P A I R O F P A R A B L E S : | | | | Impure Mathematics -=- Rodrigo de Almeida Siqueria: | | Adventures of young Polly Nomial | | | | An Eagle Speaks On Evolution -=- George Sibley | | | | S H O R T S T O R I E S : | | | | Martin Safari -=- H.G. Emert | | Rush -=- Daniel Frederick: Voted "Most Twisted" | | Eye Opener -=- Russell Hutchison | | The Man In The Ice -=- Mark T. McMeans | | Profit Margin -=- Steven Peterson | | | |------------------------------------------------------------------| THREE YEARS LATER Three years ago, when four students here at Western asked me to be faculty sponsor for an "electronic magazine," I had no idea what they were talking about. I was not, in fact, at that point really even aware of what the "Internet" was. But such ignorance was excusable three years ago, and that is a measure of just how fast things move these days. Within a year of that first encounter, all of the popular magazines working the shadow-zone between trendsetting and trendfollowing had carried cover stories about the 'net, and terms like "information superhighway" had become part of the erosion of meaningful language. After some discussion with the students, I agreed to be the front man (locally known as "faculty advisor") for their idea, to the extent that I understood it, but only with a kind of a *quid pro quo* arrangement: I would provide instruction, advice and criticism as needed on the journalistic and literary aspects of the publication, so long as they would practice on me the job of cultural education that would need to be done to make the idea of an electronic magazine engaging to a largely unsuspecting society. My "advisory" capacity, in other words, would be fulfilled in large part through my critique and evaluation of their efforts to educate me, as a typical enough know-nothing in the technoelectronic society. So, rather than saddling myself with a co-curricular responsibility--the impossible task of trying to get not just caught up with them, but far enough ahead to be their teacher--I was allowing them to saddle themselves with the 21st century's equivalent to the 15th century skeptical peasant. I'm not sure about the pedagogical ethicality there, but at least we all went into it with our eyes open. At the three-year mark, I will say that I have undoubtedly benefitted more than they have from the relationship. I will confess that I am still pretty much of an "inneterate"--that's a word I just invented for "net illiterate." This is not their fault at all; due to a host of prior commitments, I simply haven't had the time necessary to sit down at the screen and learn to negotiate cyberspace. I'm still stuck in whatever is the opposite, or predecessor, of "virtual reality." I'll never have time enough to read through my ever-expanding list of user-friendly books--and I need a few BBSs on top of that? I can send email, but I can't organize my email any better than I can organize my desk, which I only try to do when I have to move my office. But how have I benefitted? First, some good reading, not just from here but from all over the place, and a few email exchanges that would probably grow if I had time to water them with a little attention. But mostly, my benefit has been through the association with the guys doing the magazine. Yes, only guys so far: we've had a couple of submissions from women, but--except for one femme fatale who was the boyfriend of one of our writers (who ended up losing his account when he took the rap for an electroscam she pulled in the lab)--otherwise it has been an all-male show. Two of the 'zines leaders stand out--each in his own way a kind of incipient mental force in the organizing stage: -- Deva Winblood, the man who--more than any other, put the college on the 'net: not because he had any power or authority, but because he just KNEW about it, and talked about it until things happened, then wrote the first program that made it easily accessible to novices. He also wrote the program that mails the 'zine, and if it ever crashes, we will have to track him down. Deva was a lousy student in the standard sense of the term-- I'm still carrying an incomplete for a classroom course he took with me. But in addition to writing esoteric programs, he wrote--presumably still writes--esoteric stories, "Tales of the Unknown." He also began the "Worldnet Tourguide" series that continues to be one of the most valuable features of the 'zine. -- Steve Peterson, the second and current managing editor. Steve is an English major with one of the sharpest and most challenging minds I've ever encountered. With a little help from Deva initially, he had managed to teach himself to negotiate the 'net; he recently assembled Deva's old "Tourguides" with what he has learned himself into a manual which (except for his unfortunate refusal to leave spaces between paragraphs) is an excellent guide for getting into cyberspace. Like Deva, he also writes "creatively"--short stories, essays and the start of a play. There are others. Matt Thyer, who was spokesperson for the initial crew that approached me, who hardly ever wrote anything for the 'zine, but who kind of ran around in the computer sweatshop being a zany muse for everyone else. Dave Trosty, a Dionysian poet learning to negotiate the Apollonian grids of the 'net. Ben Price and Dan Frederick, who briefly but brilliantly passed through both the 'zine and the college: both what the dominant culture would be better justified in calling dropouts if the culture had ever figured out how to get them to drop in in the first place. All of these guys seem to me to working through their own responses to the "two cultures problem" described by C.P. Snow 35 years ago--the growing division between the traditional "literary humanistic" perspective with its mytho-tragic undertones, and the upstart "scientific humanistic" perspective with its "can-do" optimism. They all like to write, but they're as likely to reading SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN as HARPER'S (when they descend to paper at all)--or most likely of all: reading WIRED. But they are even more likely to be pulling in this or that from some FTP site, or practicing their scales with someone on a BBS. They are already the interdisciplinary, or metadisciplinary, scholars we're trying to figure out how to "produce" here--and they do it all without much help from us. In fact, they avoid the traditional classroom as much as they can. Those associations are what I have gained, working with this publication --arguably, at this point, under Peterson's disciplined eye, the most literate and literary thing now coming off this campus in a regular way. Over the past three years, I have from time to time used the 'zine to express some concerns about the future of the 'net, which currently seems to be in a "golden age" of ripe, jungly redundancy and splendid inefficiency, with a lot of little users more or less subsidized by the big users who built the thing in the first place (mostly with public money, of course). A publication like Western's 'zine is pretty dependent on this kind of "subsidization"--which is essentially the same kind of democratic subsidization we generate for our highway system, as opposed to the oligarchic subsidization to the powerful that we provided for the builders of the railroads a century and a half ago. Given the current political climate, I fear that choices will be made over the next few years that will gradually "organize" the 'net in ways that will make it yet another tool for the privileged and powerful for maintaining and increasing privilege and power. Instead of an "information superhighway," in other words, just another "information railroading." But that's another editorial, which I've already written. I'll close now with the hope that the medium continues to prove compatible with the hopes and efforts of people like Deva Winblood, Steve Peterson, Dave Trosty, and the others who see in it a different kind of "greening" for American culture than just another infestation of the "long green" about which the culture has become so obsessive. And a further hope: that these guys can find a faculty advisor who will always be a little out of front of them, rather than struggling as I always am just to keep up. Read on: our bark, so to speak, gets better by the byte. -- George Sibley BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 The Friend I Never Met - Notes On Electronic Faith By Bob Wilson I'm one of those people who has always had a hard time making friends. Oh yeah, I'm out and about, social and friendly enough, and I know (am acquainted with) quite a few people. But there are very few that I trust enough to touch my soul, allowing them to see the person behind the mask. Yet, what has most surprised me of late is the number of friends, real friends, I have made on the Internet. I'm absolutely amazed by how quickly I came to trust someone I had never physically seen, touched, or spoken to. Given the ever-increasing traffic on the global networks, I don't think I'm alone in this discovery. When I subscribed to my first electronic discussion group, I had no idea what would be involved - what my or anyone elses level of participation would be. I remember thinking, "Well, I'll just sit quietly over here on the fringe and read what these folks are writing about." My hesitancy to become involved was due to a lack of trust; I didn't trust the global blackbox called Internet, and I didn't initially trust the content of the messages flashing across my screen. The idea that I would have a personal exchange never occurred to me. I expected clinical opinion -- lists of lists -- dry discourse -- data. That is not what I got. What I found instead was absolutely wonderful! Here was the whole human experiment being played out on my desk. I sank into pools of language, expression, wit, and thought. The logical arguments offered were stark and beautiful, like Euclid's Postulates, while the illogical drew circles in the clouds and called them cowboys. Every morning my terminal spewed out blips of new ideas and numbing doubts, snobbish aloofness and secured acceptance, unremitting rage and unplumbed patience. I was allowed to read the thoughts, written just the night before, of someone who lives in Austria or Brazil or Finland. I had no idea what these folks looked like, what they sounded like, what economic level they enjoyed, what skin color they were. But none of that mattered; what mattered was that they wanted to share their ideas with me. Once involved in some of the discussions, I was drawn to those sub- scribers who had a better gift for the English language than I. Language skills are a lot like music skills or math skills, some people are better endowed with the gift than others. I wanted to be like them. I coveted their command of language, their ability to deftly paint pictures in the mind's eye using nothing but an ASCII text file. I also coveted their ability to approach a problem or idea from more than just one direction at a time. They consistently attacked or supported ideas from completely unanticipated directions. Although most of the time they came up with junk, there were also times that they hit on something really new and exciting. I learned that nothing was more delicious than a fresh, juicy idea marinated, broiled, and served in a sauce of humor - and that the quality of the dish reflected the skill of the chef. Although it served for introductions, electronic friendships weren't built through a listserver discussion group. It required a one-to-one contact. I had to shove aside that universal fear of rejection, knock on private electronic doors, introduce myself, and be invited in for tea. The usual reaction to my gentle tapping was typically, "Yes, what do you want?". I remember feeling awkward and intrusive. I wanted to go to great lengths to explain that I really didn't want any money from them and that I wasn't trying to sell life insurance on the Internet. I finally just said "Hello - I liked what you wrote the other day. Where did that idea come from?". For some people, that's all the encouragement they needed. They poured themselves out like water from an artesian well. Making and keeping electronic friends requires all of the same elements as personal friendships, but in somewhat amplified form. A primary element is honesty. Your words, opinions, and ideas HAVE to be honest to a fault - you can't lie and expect to keep your friend. With nothing else to support it, an electronic friendship is built on words and a fragile thread of trust that binds them. The smallest lie, discovered, snaps it. The second element is permission. If I send my friend a note about my faith or family or whatever, I also convey my permission for him/her to comment upon it, whatever they think about it. An electronic friendship cannot withstand the strain of a detonated emotional word-trap laid at the door. If you don't want comment on a topic, don't throw it out there. As in cards, if it hits the table face up, it's played. Keep it private. An electronic friendship is a pact, a covenant of privacy between two human souls. It is strange to get email discussing marriages, relationships, money, job security, etc., from persons you have never physically met. To get such mail at all is an extreme statment of faith. If you betray the privacy of your friends, the voice in the back of your mind begins to wonder aloud if your friends may likewise betray you. And then there is that nagging remembrance that Email files are, at least occasionally, archived. I prefer the term "grace" to define the final element necessary for electronic friendships. It means to demonstrate patience, acceptance, compassion, understanding, and empathy. Your friend is just as human as you are, with all the fears and failings you have. You won't have answers to all their questions and you won't necessarily be in a position to help them. You can disagree with them without dishonoring them. You may be able to help them in ways that no one else can, but it will require a certain quality of grace to do so. Here's to a long and fruitful life - and a few good friends. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 EMAIL CULTURE, PART 1: THE SUBVERSIVE SWEATSHOP By George Sibley, 'Zine Advisor and Cheerleader I comb my hair everytime before I send email hoping to appear attractive. I try and use punctuation in a friendly way also. I send :) and never :(. --Bill Gates in John Seabrook's "E-mail from Bill," NEW YORKER 1/10/94 A recent explosion in email use here at Western State College for in-house communications has me pondering again--as is appropriate for journalism faculty--the relationship between culture and communication. Until just this past fall, most intracollege communication here was via the paper trail and/or the phone; now, suddenly, everybody seems to be on the net, locally at least; and rather than taking the usual wad of brown envelopes from my mailbox back to the office to read, where I am usually interrupted often by the phone, I have to try to reorganize my time to sit down at least once a day in front of a screen to read and answer email. This is immediately a new and slightly disorienting cultural experience for me in a totally unexpected way. Being a pretty low-ranking person here, I have an old Ford Pinto of a PC in my office but do not yet warrant a VAX port, so I have to go find an open terminal somewhere else on campus in order to stay even close to the loop, let alone be in it. There is a "Faculty Computing Room" on campus for even lower ranking faculty members than I who don't even warrant the Ford Pinto model of PC. But there is one faculty person who is apparently writing a book on that terminal, as he is almost always there. So it is usually easier just to slip into one of the student computer "labs" to read and answer my mail-- if there is a terminal open there. That's where I am now, as I input these observations. This process alone--finding an open terminal and then working at it in a computer lab--has awakened me to an awareness of how sheltered my life has been to this point. I now recognize what it has meant to grow up in a middle class that is unconsciously obsessive about privacy. I didn't have a car when I went to college in 1959, which marks me I guess as "lower middle class," but I did have a typewriter, which gave me access to that which I have always taken totally for granted: a "private place" for "thinking on paper." Accordingly, it is something of a culture shock to go into the sweatshop environment of a student computer lab, where everyone works elbow-to-elbow in long ranks of machines. Every college writing teacher probably ought to spend at least an afternoon a week in such a place to truly understand the thinking- on-paper he or she receives. These labs are usually orderly enough, but they are not quiet places. The machines "breathe"; printers clatter to life, then go quiet; and a few hundred fingers on keyboards may not make the noise they would on typewriters, but you still hear them all. But there are people noises too, as you'd expect in a work environment. Turfs get staked out: nodes of MUDheads cluster around two or three machines here and there, whispering over their timeshared fantasies; two or three students bunched around a terminal with prescreen infofiles (books) propped beside it appear to be group-groping a class project; a coterie of serious prehackers is chronically present communicating through adjacent screens and reeking of contempt for everything not them. When someone has a system problem, or maybe discovers something really clever or sexy in a fingerprint, larger clusters form, chatter, and disperse to reform elsewhere. When the MacIntoshs started to "talk," the noise level in the labs went up another notch. Instead of acknowledging your stupidity with a quiet, user- friendly beep, one day all the Macs might be mooing, the next they might all be flushing or barfing. Once here they were all loaded up with a woman's voice uttering a long orgasmic groan, which everyone seemed to like: for weeks the lab sounded like a French seaside bordello with the fleet in. Even when the audible noise level is low, however, it is not like working alone in one's office. A kind of an elevated energy level always wafts, occasionally swirls and gusts, through the lab. All those minds working. And a young strong but still awkward mind just learning the disciplines of linear thought is a little like a primitive engine starting up on a cold morning. For one accustomed to the luxury of privacy for thinking, the kind of uneven, not-quite-humming silence that settles over a college computer lab when everybody in the room is intensely into whatever it is he or she is working on--that kind of "noise" in a full room can be either more invigorating or more disconcerting than any burble and buzz of whispers. Sometimes I seem to be "channelling" that ambient lab energy into my work on my own terminal; other times I find myself barely able to control the urge to shout "Fire!" or to just break out in hysterical laughter. No one would of course even look up; they'd just assume it was a MacIntosh. In short, the student labs are pretty lively places, with burgeoning communal sensibilities--maybe the most vital places you'll find on a campus today, despite all the millions being poured into "student centers"--where students mostly go, I think, to fulfill adult expectations that they are indeed still just irresponsible, immature, pleasure-oriented, self-seeking kids, growing up to be good consumers. Growing numbers of students hang out in the labs more than they do anywhere else, for the company, I'd guess, and access to that ambient lab energy, but also perhaps because there they feel closer to the edge of a future than anywhere else on campus--and not necessarily the future planned for them. Sitting and working in such places, I begin to wonder about their educational--not to mention the ultimate socio-political-- implications. Communications theorists talk about the "noise" or static that all communications systems generate--the unintended and ultimately uncontrollable random energy fluctuations inherent in the systems themselves. Black educator and author Jules Henry, in CULTURE AGAINST MAN, contended that education systems also generate that kind of "noise"--and the noise becomes part of the educational process, part of the lessons learned: subliminally, unconsciously, and therefore usually very well. The "noise" in my own pre-electronic education was mostly about competition, "personal development," the right to (and lust for) privacy and the wealth necessary to support it, and all those other fundamentally antisocial things that Americans have always confused with "individualism." Most of that is still the formal and culturally sanctioned "noise" in the system. Students still compete for scholarships and "good schools," compete for grades in "curved" classes, compete for honors, get indoctrinated against those forms of sharing defined as "cheating," and are otherwise prepared to accept as "natural" the aggressive and acommunal culture driven by self-interest: a world of winners and losers, with the ultimate winners those possessed of or by a "terminal" existence in utter privacy (e.g., that modern American legend, Howard Hughes), and the ultimate losers - those condemned by "laziness" or misfortune to that terminally public life of homelessness. But . . . can it be that the computer, one of the greatest achievements of that privacy-driven culture, is generating pockets of a subtly un-American "noise" markable by the kind of "sweatshop camaraderie" that once led to unionization, a communalism of shared information that is dangerously contemptuous of "intellectual property"? Could the uncontrollable ambient energy of such places give a new and more ominous sense to the phrase, "electronic revolution"? Reading the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, I am learn that the counter- revolution to this is already "coming on-line." Growing numbers of schools-- as one might expect, mostly the "private" schools, where America's winners send their kids to learn how to bear forward the torch of civilization as they know it--are installing terminal ports in all their student dorm rooms. Once that is accomplished, the subversive labs can be dismantled; the primacy of privacy will be re-affirmed. The CHRONICLE touts the advantages: students will be able to research their papers, write their papers, send drafts to their instructors in their cubicles and get feedback, all without the inconvenience of having to leave their desks. One projects: it will probably eventually be possible to receive one's entire education, get one's diploma, get a job, have a long career, and retire, without ever having to leave one's terminal. (On retirement, one won't even need a gold watch, since the terminals can tell you the time.) Either that--or the unquiet, untidy, germ-infested (can you get AIDS from a keyboard?) sweatshop revolution of the lab, like the one where I sit now, where someone has just screamed, "Shit! Jesus saves; why didn't I!" Memo to the administration: better get my office ported in before I'm lost forever. NEXT ISSUE: Email and the narrowing and deepening of language. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 EMAIL CULTURE 2: CREATING THE EMAIL ELITE Email is a unique communication vehicle for a lot of reasons. However email is not a substitute for direct interaction. I comb my hair everytime before I send email hoping to appear attractive. I try and use punctuation in a friendly way also. I send :) and never :(. --Bill Gates, email to writer John Seabrook, THE NEW YORKER In one of our earlier issues, one of the Western State writers working on the 'zine expressed his own fascination with the net in particular and the emerging electronic culture in general: A computer screen and a connection to the world become the greatest equalizing force I have ever known. Once you sit down and enter Cyberspace, there are no longer any judgments; there is no race, no creed, no gender. . . You are defined simply by how much you know and how you choose to use that knowledge. I found that very appealing at the time, but have been thinking about it a lot since--trying to figure out to what extent I really believe, and to what I extent I just wish I did. It is true enough that the email culture is color-blind and gender-blind. Nobody knows anything about you that you don't tell them. The flip side of that, of course, is the extent to which e-mail culture can become color-and- gender fantasyland: it is hard to check up on what anyone tells you about themselves. Most of the stories relevant to this point going around the computer sweatshops at the college are gender-related: either about an "e-romance" that turned out be an "all-users" kind of a mass mailing to a stable of potential significant others, or an electronic cross-dresser pulling a Tootsie on someone of the same gender. In cyberspace, the distinctions between "sex" and "gender" either take on a new significance or lose significance. Observations and experience on this would be appreciated here. The racial implications of the flip side are even more interesting. While I haven't heard the possibility verified in practice, I've been cogitating a story--one of the ones I'll never get around to writing, and so hereby release to anybody with the time and interest: the story is about a racist-fascist-fanatic who "fishes the nets," pretending to be a radical of whatever race he happens to hate the most, just to see who he can uncover. In my favorite version, a KuKluxer type gets his virtual rocks off by starting a black supremacist EBB full of a virulent anti-white invective, and hunting down any hapless blacks who respond. The denouement comes when he finds himself stalking another "cyberracist" like himself, who is in fact stalking him . . . Do your own ending. Such thoughts, however, engender meditations on what happens to communication when it is reduced entirely to a message--when, for the recipient, the messenger can only be inferred from the message, and vice- versa. John Seabrook explored this phenomenon at some length in his recent NEW YORKER essay on Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whom he did not meet in person, face to face, until several weeks after communicating with him via e-mail. His reflections on the differences are worth perusing on your own. E-mail, of course, does not introduce this situation; it is as old as writing. But it does bring it to a global extreme that probably warrants consideration. Human culture depends absolutely on human communication, and all communication occurs through expressions in a variety of "languages." The word "language" itself derives from the Latin word for "tongue" (lingua), and originally referred just to "the body of words and systems for their use, common to a people who are of the same community or nation, geographic area, or cultural tradition" (Webster). Through time and usage, however, the meaning of the word broadened (or deteriorated, if you prefer) to mean "communication of meaning in any way"--any set of consensual agreements in the cultural group on what certain movements, looks, touches, and the like mean, as well as sounds or symbolized sounds. "Language" is thus "body language," "eye language," eyebrow language," and any number of other more or less formalized ways we have of communicating meaning without having to say or write anything. Even if you don't accept "body language" or "eye language" as true "languages," you cannot deny that when we make the spoken word the centerpiece, so to speak, in a direct person-to-person communication, we consciously or unconsciously augment the tongue with a host of body movements, eye movements, vocal inflections, and other ways of communicating meaning. What we are wearing while speaking communicates meaning, as does the platform from which we speak (above the audience behind a podium, beneath the audience in a chair, beside the audience in bed, etc.). And all of this takes place in a atmosphere of (usually) silent but constant feedback from the recipient-audience that also communicates meaning-- the glazed look we professors see in the eyes of students (which is why some professors never look up while professing), the intensely interested look which can sometimes inspire elucidation far beyond our previous development of any idea, the look of irritation or anger that causes us to modify or temper our speech, and maybe our body language. Seabrook found disconcerting Gates' tendency to rock back and forth in his chair during conversation. Others have observed at great length that all of the technological "extensions" of human communication have, in one way or another, limited the richness and diversity of communication found in the person-to-person exchange. The telephone eliminates all communication but the spoken word; radio and tele- vision are generally used in ways that eliminate any two-way communication. But no form is "barer" in this sense than the first "technological extension" of communication: written language. Even the voice is eliminated; what you see before you is nothing but abstract markings, symbols animated only be whatever empathetic vibes I, the writer, can awaken in you, the reader, out of our common backgrounds of affective and cognitive experience. That it works at all is no small part of the miracle of the human mind. That it works so magnificently so much of the time for serious readers is a phenomenon that may deserve more attention than we give it. For example--children who live with books before they come to live with television are initially disappointed with television: the jumpy little pictures on the tube cannot come close to matching the pictures invoked in their minds by symbols on paper. But it may be only a paradigmatic bias that makes us assume this makes television inferior to reading. Aren't those magnificent imaginings a little . . . addictive? They certainly were for me, as a pre-TV person. And aren't they a kind of a deliberate manipulation of the mind--a partial deprivation of the mind's usual sensory inputs to induce a kind of artificial stimulation? Would it alter our cultural and educational perspectives any, if "nine doctors out of ten" agreed that reading is a potentially dangerous adventuring in "guided sensory deprivation for the purpose of inducing hallucinations"? ("It's midnight and your child is in bed with a book. . . . Do you know where she is?") Well. But coming back to the original student comment that inspired this exploration--I am less and less convinced of the egalitarian quality of the nets. Anyone who has had the experience of trying to teach writing at any educational level from elementary school to college knows what an elite is created by any medium that only transmits written language. As a writing teacher, I am no longer susceptible to the democratic fiction that, if only the schools were better, we could all become truly literate. When it comes to the practice of written language, we are not all created equal. We might as well say that, if the gym teachers would all only do their job, we could all be NFL quarterbacks. To say that we can all learn "competency" in literacy only begs the question in a sense. We can all learn to throw well enough to play ball with the dog and get most of our trash in the wastebasket. But taking that kind of "competency" into a cultural arena designed by and scaled to NFL standards hardly puts one on a level playing field. Nevertheless, that is what the really literate people--call us the "ultraliterate"--have, consciously or unconsciously, attempted to impose on our cultures through the education system. We expect people who barely read, and who will never really enjoy it, to be intelligent on paper about Shakespeare--and not real Shakespeare but "read Shakespeare." These are not necessarily stupid people; they are just aliterate people--probably something well over half of any given human population at this point in our evolution. (And on the other hand, there are some truly stupid, insensitive people for whom literacy is easy--quite a few of them seem to end up in English Lit Departments. Who can figure?) In the essay--that faring-forth into idea, that attempting, the essay-- we can see what happens to communication when the ultraliterate take over a culture with print media like magazines, newspapers, and email (an attempt to wrest back the tube?). Prior to around the middle of the 19th century, most essayists wrote out of an awareness of--and probably substantial experience in--an oral culture: they wrote as if they were giving a speech to an audience they couldn't quite see but of which they still had to take account. Which is to say, more specifically, they were making a presentation as if someone might suddenly challenge them on a point, maybe with an old vegetable. But after the turn of that century, after the burgeoning of the new "mass media," when print became as cheap as trees, we can see that "orational essay" begin to be replaced by the "journalistic essay": an unloading of literary broadswords, rapiers, daggers, needles and other cutting instruments with which the speaker "spoke," not as a target up in front of a possibly armed multitude, but as a shielded "weapon" himself, firing from behind a battery of increasingly expensive equipment, invulnerable to rotten vegetables, and able to both select and have the last word with responses from the audience. The mass print media made the audience a passive nonforce rather than an active participant in communication--an entity to be seduced rather than approached, "dealt with" rather than engaged. If it sounds like I am saying that the print media have led to an increasingly uncivil discourse in the one-way transmissions that pass for communication in modern society--I guess that is in fact what I am saying. Television cannot, however, be at all considered a way of restoring civility (or true communication) to communication--it just adapts for an oral elite the strategies that worked for the literate elite, in turning communication into a one-way tool for manipulating people. If it is more successful, it is only because more people are reachable through oral, as opposed to literate, approaches. But television learned its strategies from the newspaper, not from the theatre--which like the oration, was, is, a two-way interactive process of communication. The hard truths behind the observation that "we allow freedom of the media to anyone who can afford one" makes a mockery of the concept of communication in a market economy. In one sense, e-mail culture does begin to be a step back toward a truer form of communication: everyone on the nets is more or less equally accessible; as soon as you put your thoughts out there with an electronic address, you set yourself up for a splat by the virtual vegetable. We will see whether this will tend to restore a more "oral" civility to written discourse. Whether the medium changes the nature of the messages or not, however, it is important to recognize that it is a medium of communication among a privileged elite: an elite because it selects for literacy, and privileged because of the access, which is still pretty much limited by participation in certain economic and political institutions. Just based on the part of the population it draws from, the nature of the discourse one encounters, and the fascination with gaming and role-playing evident in the college computer sweatshops turning out the next generation of emailers, I would predict that the "email elite" will probably evolve into a class somewhat like the samurai of feudal Japan: a potentially dangerous warrior class that has been neutralized by elaborate behavior codes, privilege, and a generous access to the leavings and scraps from the real powers. The nets will keep most of us ultraliterati docile and happy, consciously or unconsciously directing our work-energy toward maintaining the status quo that maintains the net that "nets" us all. --George Sibley fac_sibley@wsc.colo.edu BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 New Prejudices By Steven Peterson Control. That's what everything seems to be about these days. In personal terms, or at the sociological level, a pathological desire to maintain physical and psychological control of others lies at the foundation of our basest acts. Last week, I caught the television interview with Jeffery Dahmer, who is perhaps America's most notorious and frightening criminal. The one reason he offered to explain his desire to commit grotesque and brutal acts was "an obsessive need to control others; to make them do whatever I wanted them to do." Absolutely terrifying in its simplicity, Dahmer's rationalization is hardly new or original. Last week, I kept running into this "logic of control" as I began to read the Human Rights Country Reports (prepared by our U.S. Department of State). Released last month, these reports are drawn from a variety of sources and cover the state of internationally recognized individual, political, civil, and worker rights as set forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This grim review of armed conflicts, torture, and arbitrary detention reveals a lowest common denominator of human behavior: an obsessive drive in individuals to use political organizations to maintain power over individuals. This drive typically expresses itself in the overt mechanisms of "laws" written and designed to grant a select few absolute control over the lives of a population. For purposes of illustration, the two Koreas (North and South) provide an excellent portrait of two nations moving in opposite directions on the road to a more humane, civilized world. According to the report, the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (North Korea) continues to suffer under the absolute rule of the Korean Workers' Party (KWP), a political organization which exercises power on behalf of Kim Il Sung, a self-styled dictator. In order to maintain his position, Sung has constructed a form of government predicated on repression, rigid control of the citizenry (there's that word again), and a general prohibition on individual rights. According to Amnesty International, entire families are imprisoned together in forced "reeducation through labor" camps for various crimes. While scant information on North Korea's criminal justice process is known, portions of their Criminal Law are pretty revealing: Article 52, for instance, mandates the death penalty for crimes such as "ideological divergence", "counter-revolutionary crimes", and "collusion with imperialists". The North Korean report goes on to detail a spectrum of insults to the human spirit: detention centers described by defectors as "concentration camps", routine denial of Fair Public Trials to political offenders, strictly curtailed rights of freedom of expression and association, travel restrictions (internal and external), and a total lack of worker's rights - most of the population seems to exist in a state of servitude resembling slavery. In a passage which would fit right into "1984", the report states "Citizens in all age groups and occupations are subject to indoctrination designed to shape and control individual consciousness. This effort is aimed at ensuring reverence for Kim Il Sung and his family, as well as conformity to the State's ideology and authority." About the only missing ingredient in this perverse life- imitating-art tale of anguish and despair is the "Two-Minutes Hate". On the other side of the 38th parallel, the Republic of Korea (South) has taken several long strides toward reforming their nation. Last year, the South Korean people inaugurated Kim Young Sam of the Democratic Liberal Party as their President. According to the report, Kim, the first civilian chief executive to take office in the last thirty years, has "instituted sweeping political reforms to reduce corruption, further institutionalize democracy, and improve human rights" during his first year in office. These reforms are designed to curb, eliminate, or make reparations for the previous administration's excesses and violations of basic human rights. Aside from releasing hundreds of political prisoners, the South Korean government has "mandated disclosure of financial and real estate assets by government officials, first in March, and then in June [of 93], the latter of which led to the resignation of many judicial officials, including the Supreme Court Chief Justice, the Prosecutor General, and the national police chief in September." The ensuing personnel shuffle has replaced these draconian law-givers with individuals "generally considered committed to the independence and integrity of the judiciary." This shuffle has had immediate consequences: violent student unrest has declined radically, political dissidents are being allowed to stage peaceful protests (May Day march), and arrests for political crimes have decreased dramatically (from 305 in 1992 to around 80 in '93). These developments underscore the potential for rapid change in a society committed to the erstwhile values represented by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although the South Korean report paints a pretty rosy picture of progress, it also points out an Achilles heel - the long-standing fear of invasion or domination from the north supports certain sanctions against travel across the border and free speech deemed "pro-North Korean" or socialist. Given the North's recent escalation of the nuclear threat and the continued cold-war style military stand-off, their fears and sanctions seem reasonable. In comparing the two Koreas, it's tempting to reduce the situation to an archetypical face-off between socialism and capitalism. To some extent, there are characteristics which lend themselves to that sort of analysis, but the gory details presented in these reports bring the reality of people's pain right into your face. The dispassionate tone of a government document, with its statistics and legalistic language, usually allows me the distance to gain some measure of "objectivity" - not so in this case. So far, I've only read a handful of the more than two hundred reports released last February ... and every one of them can pierce right into my soul. For myself, awareness has been the first step toward attaining a personal sense of "world citizenship". Becoming part of the larger community of *humanity* carries with it certain responsibilities: acquiring personal knowledge of and about the condition of your fellow man and woman, wherever they may be; a desire to do what you can to improve the lives of individuals; and finding the courage to *feel* the pain, the anguish, and the terrible weight of the injustices we would rather not contemplate. It is our outrage, our conscious refusal to accept the status quo, which fuels the collective human drive toward moral evolution. It's up to us, people. On the personal level, we can use our economic power to boycott the products of repressive regimes, we can use our power of the vote in democratic societies to support candidates who will lean on other heads of state to bring their people the rights and guarantees which are the birthright of all humans, and finally, we can pledge our support to human rights groups like Amnesty International. Start in your homes and bring the battle to the larger world. Send letters, attend meetings, be loud, get nasty, whatever it takes - don't let our silence support the despots. I began this column talking about control - the obsessive drive for it we all feel at some point, in some way, in our lives. For me, it's my dog - I go a little nuts when my "training" fails (I never use violence, tho', it simply confuses and scares animals - people too). As Don Quixote discovered in his mythical forays into the "world-as-it-is" of medieval Spain, individual control is illusory; it fails as an instrument for changing the "world-as-it-should-be". It is the collective spirit and drive of a people which ultimately brings change to a society - the days of the benevolent dictator have passed. I, for one, do not mourn their passing. "Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under." - H.L. Mencken BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 C y b e r S p a c e ===================== Gibsonian Mythology By Deva Bryson Winblood In today's technology based cultures and cliques there is a common interest in ideas that revolve around "CyberSpace." This term was first popularized by William Gibson in his award winning book _Neuromancer_. Gibson presented computer networks as a global medium of power. Similar situations were described in books such as _Shockwave Rider_ by John Brunner. Brunner's literature predates Gibson's and is perhaps more accurate in terms of today's emerging computer networks. The difference between CyberSpace in Brunner's and Gibson's books is that of perception. In Brunner's book, cyberspace was viewed much as the internet is perceived today, but on a grander scale that could very well be a forecast of the future of the internet. Gibson's _Neuromancer_, on the other hand, projected the idea of a new interface. Gibson initiated the world to a new idea for a user interface. To understand the major leap in the Gibsonian vision one must understand what a user interface is. A user interface is the method by which YOU, the user interfaces (accesses) the computer. Computers initially had almost no interface at all when one recalls the TOGGLE switches of the first computers. This was followed by punch cards which were equally unfriendly. The step-up from these now prehistoric interfaces was the development of the Command Line Interface (CLI). This enabled one to type on a keyboard and have the typed-in material appear on a screen. The user would then press RETURN (ENTER on some machines) and that COMMAND would be processed by the computer. This was a purely TEXT interface. This changed with the work of XEROX PARC research teams. They were working on a Graphic Interface. This interface was the predecessor of the Macintosh, Amiga, GEOS, Windows, and several other interfaces. These interfaces are the CURRENT top of the line method for user interaction with a computer. This interface is a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Now one has a better foundation to understand the vision of William Gibson. Gibson introduced what might be called a Sensory User Interface. This is a term just invented in this article. The interface as relayed by Gibson involved all the senses and in fact was a step beyond the idea of Virtual Reality (VR) as practiced today. In Gibsonian CyberSpace a person perceives other users in computer systems around them as well as always being in a setting that corresponds to the contents of a computer and other computers in a geographical region. ENTER MYTHOLOGY Gibsonian ideas were created on a typewriter by a man who admits to knowing little about computers at the time. This is one of those fateful situations where a person of little background in a field gains insight into something that those in the KNOW were not aware of. His idea brought hope for more intimacy, realism, and excitement in the future of computing. Quickly the Gibsonian ideas were embraced as THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING. While the Gibsonian ideas should be used as a source of inspiration, the current abilities of computers and the way they handle data causes several blocks which inhibit the Gibsonian vision. These problems are in areas of geopositional realism and speed. The Gibsonian vision pitches the computer user into a computer world that parallels that of the real world. If you JACK IN to your CyberDeck and look around you will notice that your next door neighbor is also jacked in. You will then look into the distance and see a sensory image for every computer in your neighborhood. In the distance, you will see the towering computer nets of local businesses. This is the geopositional aspect of Gibsonian cyberspace. Enter the problem. Computer networks do not work in a fashion that will enable this geopositional aspect to function. Your computer does not know the difference between crossing a satellite uplink to reach the next computer and crossing a desk. Without this knowledge available to the computer, it would be difficult to establish a perspective of SURROUNDING LOCAL COMPUTERS. Likewise, computer networks function from computer to computer. Your computer can identify whichever computers it is directly linked to and none beyond. Using modern network protocols, you can still communicate with computers beyond your own. There is no guarantee that those computers exist until your request for that computer traverses the net and either succeeds or fails and bounces back. The second problem that makes Gibsonian CyberSpace an unlikely future is the issue of speed. Take a moment... Consider the processing speed required to maintain the position and state of every USER and COMPUTER in your network vicinity. IMMENSE processing time. It has been said by some computer researchers that the real time RAY TRACING (Image processing) that would enable VR of a minimum level to produce effects such as those seen in the movie _Lawnmower Man_ would require a computer with a processing speed of at least 400 million instructions per second (400 MIPS). Current desktop computers average around 10 to 20 MIPS. This is the speed necessary to maintain JUST the visual aspect of realistic VR. Gibsonian CyberSpace has full sensory aspects (visual, touch, smell, taste, and sound) as well as maintaining accurate geopositional setting and still leaving room to run other programs. The speed of ANY computer interacting with a Gibsonian net would have to be IMMENSE to the point of being most likely unattainable. While these problems may place Gibsonian CyberSpace in the halls of mythology, Gibson's vision can still be an inspiration to the programmers of today. New interfaces that are attainable can be created and implemented on even today's limited computer power. GEOPOSITIONAL: The geopositional aspect can be maintained by a series of localized computers that I refer to as MAP NODES. The sole purpose of these computers would be to respond to queries and send geopositional information to local computers. The map node would also handle incoming messages of computers coming on and off-line and update its "MAP" correspondingly. SPEED: While keeping it real-time is currently unattainable, the "MAP" updates could be often enough to make it workable. This would not be a problem as long as each MAP NODE was only responsible for a limited area. VR: The VR aspect could be accomplished by creating a simple communication protocol for the MAP NODES that would enable them to pass on quick graphic information with query responses. All that would be required would be a program that can interpret and react to these graphic messages for each platform (computer). Visionary thinking is useful no matter its plausibility. Let all mistakes be a gateway to further knowledge. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 A Cautionary Note to Congress By Steven Peterson [Note: The Clipper chip is an integrated circuit the U.S. government wishes to place in all computers, cellular phones, and cable t.v. boxes. Its purpose is to allow our National Security Agency and other law enforcement agencies to "tap" and decode our messages. Our leaders are pushing the Clipper as an alternative to "PGP" and other robust encryption programs. The "backdoor" feature designed into the program creates a conflict between our right to privacy and the government's desire to prevent criminals and terrorists from using the 'Net.] The Clipper Chip is doomed to fail miserably ... for many reasons. Our government's arrogance and ignorance shine through with a special luminosity on this piece of legislation. One of the first laws of the digital culture (if you can build it, we can hack it) will prevent the chip from serving its intended purpose. No matter how brilliantly you may design it, there are sixteen-year-old kids out there who *will* tear it apart, figure it out, and subvert it for their own purposes. Simply for the challenge it offers. The Clipper proposal makes as much sense as building a state-of-the-art safe, sticking a million dollars in it, and then putting it in a safe-cracker's living room. It will be broken, it's just a matter of time. The underlying arrogance of the NSA and the designers of this chip will prove to be their downfall; there is no way any team of individuals can stay ahead of the collective abilities of an entire sub- culture bent on maintaining its right to privacy. The second law of the digital culture (if it can be established, it can be subverted and/or compromised) will give the NSA more grief than the first law. Anyone bent on using the National Information Infrastructure (NII) for nefarious purposes is going to love the Clipper. Government agencies are not the only organizations which understand the value of dis-information. Anyone bright enough to use advanced tele-communications is bright enough to send anyone listening in on wild goose chases around the globe. Remote login and mirror commands will distract investigative agents, embedded or multiple layers of encryption will confuse the issue, and with 40 million plus users of e-mail, the sheer volume will prohibit any systematic efforts to isolate criminal or terrorist messages. The third law of the digital culture (knowledge cannot be suppressed) points out the "pandora's box" problem of attempting to control encryption; PGP and other encryption programs are already out there. The government can prohibit, proscribe, and prosecute, but it cannot put the djinni back in the bottle. Drawing battle-lines between the Constitution and the NSA's misguided, foolish attempt to maintain its ability to snoop at will only divides our nation and diverts everyone from the real issue - how can we use this tool to improve the state and quality of human civilization. Technology is rapidly changing the human condition; wasting grotesque amounts of money trying to prevent any undesirable elements from changing with it is as foolish as trying to stop the hands of time. I realize that we all must bow to the absurd from time to time; however, the price tag on the Clipper folly is just too high to quietly accept. Dissipating our time, money, and energy on a quixotic battle to contain the uncontainable will only slow progress. The Clinton White House and Congress must face the fact that the only way to achieve any real control of digital communication will be to: a) dismantle the Internet; b) confiscate all computers and modems (and the parts used to build them); and c) transform our nation into a totalitarian state. No power on Earth has managed to make that plan succeed (the first example that springs to mind is the underground 'Net distribution of reports from Chinese students during the Tianneman Square demonstrations). Indeed, no plan to grant a government that sort of power deserves to succeed - it's an open insult to the dignity and character of human beings. Please feel free to re-distribute this note to all who are involved in this debate. We must STOP and THINK before we set in motion any measure such as Clipper which threatens to rend the fabric of our society. Future generations of Americans will not forgive us for our ignorance and short-sightedness on this issue. Act Now! [Note: This file is also available on the EFF ftp site. --Ed.] BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS SEEK NETWORK CONNECTIONS By George Sibley I.C.S. received a copy of a communication from A.E. Varshavsky at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, announcing the creation of a non- profit "Strategy Priorities Foundation" (SPF), whereby Russian scientists in the post-Cold-War era hope to offer services and establish connections with private and public entities around the world. Observing that "now Russian science has a hard time," Varshavsky essentially announces the availability of Russian scientists in all fields for collaborative projects in and out of Russia. The purpose of the Strategy Priorities Foundation, he says, is to "avail leading universities, research institutions, and companies in all countries of the world of unique economic and technical information on the state and perspectives of science and technology in Russia. An analysis of the economic problems of stability, conversion and disarmament is in the framework of SPF's interests as well." Among other possibilities, Varshavsky envisions Russian scientists acting as consultants for private or public entities interested in the opportunities afforded by the Soviet political meltdown. E-mail addresses for Varshavsky are (BITNET) C20501@SUCEMI or (INTERNET) vars@cemi.msk.su. Snailmail: SPF, Central Economics and Mathematics Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 32 Krasikova St. (Room 406), Moscow, 117418 RUSSIA. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Building a School Without Buildings By Ken Blystone Thousands of students in El Paso, Texas are going to school without leaving home. They "travel" to school via computer modem, meeting in new electronic hallways and classrooms not because they have to attend, but because they want to. This summer, students from all parts of the city will attend the Academy Virtual School. This new electronic school provides kids of all ages a fun and exciting place to gather. It is a safe environment that can be explored from home under parental supervision, and local public schools are starting to catch on to the concept. Over the past decade, telecomputing activities have become highly popular with children. This has caused rapid growth in local, regional, and national educational computer networks. Computers attached to modems allow computer users to transmit and receive text files, software programs, digitized images, and digital music over standard telephone lines. Such activities are becoming commonplace for computer users, especially for young people who have computers in their homes. Public schools have recognized the need to teach students how to use computers and have installed many machines for this purpose. But the educational use of computers has focused primarily on using the computer in a "stand-alone" fashion. Now, more and more schools are beginning to connect their computers to instructional networks by purchasing modems and linking their computers together through the telephone system. Schools have found that it is easy and relatively inexpensive to start a campus-based computer network. Last school year, five public schools in El Paso started educational campus-based systems run by teachers. Del Valle High School, Wiggs Middle School, Desert View Middle School, Indian Ridge Middle School, and Eastwood Heights Elementary each run a campus computer their students can call. Each school system is connected to FidoNet, a 22,000 member computer network established in 1984. FidoNet is a "grassroots" network that provides connectivity for millions of people all over the world at little or no cost. The UTEP College of Education sponsors a system on this network to allow future teachers the opportunity to be mentored by experienced teachers. Since many of the electronic conferences on FidoNet are "gated" to Internet, many non-university people (parents and public school children) now have access to Internet through FidoNet. In 1990, a group of teachers in the United States and Canada started the International K12 Network. Operating as a sub-set of FidoNet, the K12 Network has spread to nearly 500 systems in 12 countries in only three years. By "piggy backing" the smaller K12Net on the larger structure of FidoNet, students and teachers are the winners. Using school computers connected to FidoNet/K12Net, students and teachers have the ability to form friendships with people all over the world. The familiar term "pen-pals" is changing into "key-pals" since children now use keyboards instead of pens to write to each other. Teachers from around the world volunteer their time and expertise to make the system work. The French teacher at Desert View Middle School, Toy Wong, uses the K12 Network in her classroom to help students learn the language and culture of France. Her students are encouraged to write e-mail messages in French to students in France or Canada. After students in France receive messages from students in El Paso, they respond in English (the language they are trying to learn) through the computer network. Since messages are transmitted electronically, it is usually only a matter of hours before the mail is "delivered." This makes the process of key-pals much more interactive than pen-pals since hand delivered letters to distant countries can take days or even weeks to deliver. In addition to using computer networks for key-pal activities, schools have found many other instructional benefits of telecomputing. Students can use modems to tap into electronic libraries to look up information stored in computer databases. Some systems allow students to take tests on-line that are automatically scored and recorded. Students also use telecomputing to work collaboratively on the creation of digital artwork and music. Most K12 Network systems make free educational software available to teachers and students through a process known as downloading. On-line peer tutoring is also possible on multi-line systems. Callers type back and forth to each other while connected to the system. This has become one of the most popular activities for students ages 10 through 18 on the Academy Virtual School. Students spend many hours on-line each day writing to their electronic friends. The Academy serves eight school districts in west Texas. Its success can be measured, in part, by the extent to which local teachers and students have voluntarily embraced this computer-mediated environment. Over 5,000 students, teachers, parents, and community participants meet in this electronic environment without the need for a physical school building. The Academy is operated by Academy Network Systems, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing educational opportunities for students to learn and teachers to teach via modern telecommunications technology. The system gets approximately 30,000 calls per month. Through the work of many dedicated teachers and community volunteers, the Academy Network has grown from a simple single line system started in 1985 into a dynamic 15 line electronic school built out of modems and microchips instead of bricks and mortar. The impact of computer telecommunications on how we conduct education is likely to be greater than we can presently imagine. As a virtual school, the Academy is radically different from traditional schools. It remains open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Students read lessons, take tests, ask questions and get answers "virtually" as they would in a traditional physical school building - but without leaving their keyboard. Instead of students going to school, the virtual school comes to them through their computer screen. This school, although it has no physical campus, serves thousands of students and it only cost $5,000 to create. This is an important fact to taxpayers and school board members who are looking for economical ways to provide instruction to children. While a traditional school that serves thousands of students would cost millions of dollars to build, a virtual school can be started for a fraction of that cost. Inasmuch as limited funding is available for desired school improvements, it is important to understand the potential for new technologies to help bring about fundamental educational change. By expanding our mind-set from one that can only conceive of education taking place in a traditional physical school building to one that includes reaching students using virtual schools, we may actually be able to provide instruction in new ways. I encourage parents, teachers, and school board members to work toward the development of community sponsored virtual schools that serve all children within their locale. A virtual school can serve the collective educational needs of students in new and exciting ways. Yet, to be able to take advantage of electronic schools teachers need access to educational networks. Schools need the money necessary to buy modems and telephone lines that will allow them to begin to explore the electronic global village. Modems and the instant networks they create can join schools, businesses and homes together. Every minute a child spends in an electronic virtual school is a minute spent reading and writing--interacting with an educational community that is global in scope. Electronic schools are interactive, inclusionary, equalizing, provocative, and educational. Electronic virtual schools are dynamic and, most importantly, affordable. Electronic learning environments are changing the way in which children learn. Every day a virtual school can present the student with new and interesting challenges that come from a worldwide community of learners. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Computer-Mediated Communication Part 1 By Steven Peterson ICS is, by design, a 'zine devoted to providing our readers with a distillation of the best or most interesting thoughts and ideas we come across. In a sense, we (the humble staff and contributors) are using technology to present symbolic information to you, our audience, in a relatively new and different manner. Although we employ a traditional sort of lay-out, what makes this enterprise unique is the delivery mechanism (e-mail); it is an example of one of the forms of computer- mediated communication (CMC) which now offer individuals, small groups, and larger organizations new and different methods of channelling information and routing communications. Most forms of CMC utilize networked or multi-user programming; this simple fact fundamentally alters the nature of small-group and mass communications through shifting the focus of interaction from a one-to-many to a many-to-many distribution architecture (within the context of the machinery, at least). In this series of articles, I will survey CMC related research conducted during the 80s and 90s which examines human responses to this new technology and defines some of the communication challenges it presents to all who use it. The proliferation of computer networks and their growing use for communicative purposes during the 1980s led Kiesler et. al., a research group from Carnegie Mellon university, to investigate the social and psychological issues CMC technology presented. Working with the existing technologies (1984), the team identified five important social and psychological aspects of CMC: time and information processing pressures, absence of regulating feedback, dramaturgical weakness, few status and position cues, and the potential depersonalizing effects of social anonymity (Kiesler 1125). As many of you are no doubt aware, these five aspects surface as either benefits or drawbacks to virtually every form of CMC, depending on the context, the intended purpose, and the degree of structure imposed by the specific format. Kiesler's initial study (the first to use modern, fast terminals and flexible conferencing and mail software) examined the impact of CMC on group interaction and decision-making processes as compared to traditional face-to-face methods. The study charted the efforts of three-person groups to reach group consensus on choice-dilemma problems in varied conditions: face-to-face conferencing, simultaneous computer conferencing, anonymous simultaneous computer conferencing, and e-mail. The first variable (or aspect), communication efficiency, identified time-consuming information processing problems in the many-to-many format of CMC. Kiesler noted "CMC groups took longer to reach consensus than did face-to-face groups, and they exchanged fewer remarks in the time allowed them" (1128). Apparently, the swift distribution of many thoughts and ideas taxes the individual's capacity to sort information - somewhat analogous to putting a two-barrel carburetor on a twelve-cylinder engine - it fires, but not very efficiently. At the individual level, attempting to deal with the combined outputs of multiple listservs can become overwhelming in a hurry. Many of my peers describe various methods of "editing" on-the-fly as they browse through subject lines, describing the process as "crude, but effective". Quite often, they confess to "unsubscribing" from one list or another because they simply do not have time to sort through it all (a message common in ICS unsub requests). This sort of all-or-nothing response to the electronic "tower of babel" underscores the human need for context, organization, and relevance. To varying degrees, the other four social and psychological aspects identified by Kiesler affect the efficiency and rate of participation in CMC environments: the absence of regulating feedback is linked to an increase in uninhibited verbal behavior ("flaming") and to a greater rate in decision shifting; dramaturgical weakness (the lack of non-verbal cues and reinforcement) seems to affect the decision-making process by masking leadership cues (1129); the status and position cues evident in face-to-face communication create an inequality of participation which is reduced in CMC formats; and the social anonymity CMC offers can be liberating or alienating, depending on the perspective of the individual and the amount of "embedded structure" in the specific format (1130). Despite the difficulties and drawbacks Kiesler's team identified, they somewhat prophetically note the popularity of the medium and predict "a more permanent effect [of CMC] might be the extension of participation in group or organizational communication. This is important because it implies more shared information, more equality of influence, and, perhaps, a breakdown of social and organizational barriers" (1131). This breakdown of barriers occasionally surfaces at Western State (home to ICS); personally, I have exchanged some e-mail with administrators and professors, and Western has an on-line advising service which offers same-day e-mail responses to a wide variety of questions. Although the technology may be in place, the barriers still have not really fallen: the address may be widely available, but if the receiver chooses to ignore all messages, no progress is possible (we all may be aware of president@whitehouse.gov, but it's not quite the same as getting a message into the man's hands). Kiesler's ground breaking study provides an excellent base for a comparative analysis of CMC research - the same social and psychological aspects surface in many of the studies conducted over the last ten years. As a reminder, I will lead off installments in this series with a "boxed set" of the five central issues of CMC research: ______________________________________________________ | Five Aspects of computer-mediated communication (CMC)| | 1) Time/Information processing pressures | | 2) Absence of regulating feedback | | 3) Dramaturgical weakness | | 4) Few status/position cues | | 5) Depersonalization of social anonymity | ------------------------------------------------------ As I examine research on electronic bulletin boards (EBBs), electronic brainstorming programs (EBS), and group decision support software (GDSS) in future installments, I invite you to e-mail your thoughts and suggestions concerning possible solutions to the "big 5" to me at Org_Zine@wsc.colorado.edu - please incorporate "CMC" into the subject line. I will attempt to append a distillation of the most promising solutions as something of a public service (guerrilla innovation?). Part 2 will cover EBS research, so please send in your suggestions for handling large numbers of ideas on a daily basis. Work Cited Kiesler, Sara, et.al. "Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-Mediated Communication." *American Psychologist*. Vol.39,No.10,1984. 1123-1134. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 W o r l d N e t Tour Guide Digital Freedom Network WorldNet Tour Guide returns! We will strive to make it a part of each issue. The Guide will contain articles to help in using the WorldNet to the fullest potential. The articles here will range from tutorials on aspects of WorldNet to reviews of sites and resources on the WorldNet. If you would like to write a file or document to appear in this section, please do so. Send your final copy (in ASCII format) to: ORG_ZINE@WSC.COLORADO.EDU ------- * The Digital Freedom Network (DFN) is one of the more interesting sites I've run across on the 'Net - imagine a place where writers from around the world can share their cultural, religious, and political experiences with people around the world, and you will likely dream up something very much like the DFN. Billed as an "Anti-Censorship BBS", the DFN currently offers material produced by dissidents (and just plain citizens) from Russia, Iran, Indonesia, China, and Egypt. There is also a file titled "Index" which details the aims and goals of the "Index on Censorship" - a supporting member of the DFN and constant defender of free speech and Human Rights. Gopher iia.org 70, cd "Digital Freedom Network" to access the files (You can skip the following review if you like to preserve the sense of net-adventure). A brief description of available files: China: Extracts from _Wei Jingsheng Searching for the Truth_ selected and edited by Peter Harris - A description of one man's odyssey through the "cultural revolution" and his political and thinking resistance to the events he witnessed. Iran: Text from _The Hejleh_ - A mother's reflections on her martyred son's fate. Very touching, and a bridge of understanding that's worth crossing. Egypt: _Death on the Nile_ - A chilling expose of Moslem fundamentalism and its holocaustal effects on the minds and souls of a nation. Russia: _My Diary Under the Iron Heel_ by Mikhail Bulgakov - an unusual glimpse of the life of a Russian writer during the twenties as he searches for signs of life in a world of madness. Culled from the KGB literary archive (somewhat spotty translation). Indonesia: Two excerpts from _This Earth of Mankind_ by Pramoedya Amanta Toer, translated by Max Lane - A personal story describing the life and times of a soldier in the Dutch Indies Army. Told from a mother's point-of-view. For more information, contact: Digital Freedom Network Headquarters / IDT dfnidt@iia.org 294 State Street Hackensack, NJ 07601 USA INDEX on Censorship indexoncenso@gn.apc.org Lancaster House 33 Islington High Street London N1 9LH UNITED KINGDOM Human Rights Watch hrwatchnyc@igc.apc.org 485 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10017 USA International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) Committee to Protect Journalists ccpj@web.apc.org 490 Adelaide Street West -Suite 205 Toronto M5V 1T2 CANADA ----- Note: ICS founder and former WorldNet Tour Guide author Deva Winblood has moved on to other challenges. Various members of the ICS staff will be offering Tour Guide installments for your enjoyment, and, as always, we accept contributions from any and all corners of cyberspace [Ed.]. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 T W O P O E M S By Heather Elliot ----------------------------------------+------------------------------------ |SPACE BAR 761-TIME |* * |sittin at the bar Hello you have reached... |with the reals * |scoping missles To commemorate the |in walked an hourglass idiosyncrasies of |time warped TIME |men were moving at light speed It is currently 11:01pm.. |converging on a black hole * |us reals inched along like sloths Thank you for calling First National |realized we weren't chicks |just flew the coop ----------------------------------------+------------------------------------ BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 The Map By Gayle L. Allenback ++ =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Planning my route to paradise, I'm aware of the stack of books on the table. Reading them would make me blind, So I travel on with my sight, Getting worn down by gravel roads. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 S e v e r a l P o e m s B Y Heather Elliott -------------------------------------+--------------------------------------- AURA |RUB * |* i felt the cold breeze |turnout wrap around me |step yet i retained |transfer a shell |transfer of warmth |focus * |HALT i can only feel |* your cool breeze |you were bug-eyed but i know | hands dropped to the side that such warmth |* encases you |saw your cute belly * | became Buddha i want to wrap up |* in the aura |could I feel that warmth of your warmth | again? on a cold clear | night | -------------------------------------+--------+------------------------------- FreeFall |AN EVENING WITH _ * |* You said you'd catch me |mellow if I fell |comforting but I couldn't let myself fall |relaxing * |soft drums beat in the |background Afraid of that sinking feeling |pillows fly so much resembling |smiles sparkle utter disappointment |eyes glitter * |yet, we each have our own drum Filled with worry |stunts became a wallflower |games * |jokes Saw that I could do the steps |and my drum beats out of sync said I'd be fine | if I followed your lead | * | I followed with such grace| I'm falling | catch me | ----------------------------------------------+------------------------------- BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 POETRY: 2 (of 6) Poems By Stewart Carington SUBJECT:emotion --------------- Mental tears shall all abound; Yet in the physical realm none shall be found Mortal thoughts may all remain; But no love is there left to yet reclaim When you trace the sullen flight, Of a Crow into the speckled night All that remains a distant dream-Until the sun breaks the endless seam... Sunlight turns in it's puest form, Releases the traced emotions worn Grips the fist on one's fate, Gives the choice that you shall in time berate Inters the worth of your wealth, to find in the end it should have been health Cross the cavern of your dreams- To caress the tears of mighty seas. Think of yesterday as freedom's chain, And never know that bond again. Drink from the pool of broken sorrow, Then breathe the air of newborn morrow Awaken to that light, tender touch, and remember to feel.... I miss you much. SUBJECT:a walk through my wall ------------------------------ no, It's not the same, and I would love to walk through the rain with you. A lonely sill, lonely true. A silent dove, through the window grew. Sit next to me for mine life, scream the silence of eternal strife, To be with me you must leave me alone, let me face myself, the ugly clone. desert rain beat through my brow, a speared patter, hits me now tis the tear of your lip, from above reflected in the isles of love. silent pondering one-hundred proof, sink emotion, but bury me away.... from truth..... for tis not like me to do this here, not like me to put you through this spin... only alone can I but win.....sorry, it's true, let me be for a while.... insanity's not new.... an old friend, back again doesn't like visitors....... .............will leave in a while.... ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 )============== i wish i could write =============( By Clint Thompson i wish i could write. i wish i could reach the deepest deep of my soul with a pen, and wrench it free. i wish i could write the wings of a bird, or explain the sound of love in spring. i wish i could capture the taste, in a word, of a breath of mountain air at twilight. the sun in twisting robes of red and orange descends into her bed. no, i must watch the moment then watch the moment leave... unable to hold it here with paper and ink. the greatest moments of my life are volumes only read by me. unable to live by paper and pen for all the world to see. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 "Women" By Jami Jo Tobey I am alive searching seeking yearning for the unknown the untouched. Waiting for the sun listening for the moon dancing with the earth watching the clouds laugh kissing the melting rainbows running down the mountains swimming upstream and being still. You never see me but you touch me when you breathe and cry. You hold my hand unaware. We are of the same seed yet completely different. I am the rain and you soak me up with your warmth. I am the snow that makes you smile and the fire that keeps you warm. I will live forever within you and of you. You will never know me but you will forever love me. I am you best friend perhaps your worst enemy? BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Eyes of Love by Jason Manczur How can one set of eyes be So very deep, and so very bright? They shine like the stars, With a heavenly light. They're deep like an ocean, Pretty as they can be. I love your eyes, But do they love me? A better question Asks the same of you. If the answer is yes, I'll ne'er be blue. I want to tell you Just how much I care, That I really love you, And will always be there. If you need someone for any reason, If my heart is not there, It will hang for treason. That is how much I love you my dear. When we are together, You have nothing to fear, For my love will protect you. I love you with all of my heart and my soul. If you do not love me, It will take its toll On my heart and my spirit, And the depths of my mind. When I am with you I always find A warmth and a caring That fills up my life. Oh, please my love, Will you be my wife? KNYGHT BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Walking Alone In A Wet Autumn Night Closed, cluttered quarters, relinquished control Captive by chance and exacting it's toll Remove conversation Regain affirmation Walking alone in a wet autumn night Dark, like a comfort, a safe place to hide The mist held my face in her arms as I cried Remove all the sound Shoes pummel the ground Walking alone in a wet autumn night The dew in the grass is soaking my feet I've come here for answers to questions complete Remove just the fear A healing draws near Walking alone in a wet autumn night This love in my life lies gently with me Possessing a strength not easy to see I'll seek out her light Relinquish this fight By walking alone in a wet autumn night ___________________________________________________________________________ Bob Wilson bobw@ncatfyv.uark.edu ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 WHAT IS MINE By Clint Thompson "It established the Commerce Department to therefore and hitherto, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera..." Sometimes I don't understand our world. (Or the countries and people in it) But when Our Flag is unfurled there is a small spot in my heart that understands a courageous act. Right now I wish that I could be somewhere else. I mean besides this class, Not on some other planet or anything. (Even though the thought has crossed my mind) I get tired of sitting on this hard wood chair with it's hard wood back. I get tired of hearing this nonsense of "Expressed, Implied, and Inherent Powers" POWER to me is wielded with a Silver Sword from astride a White Horse. Evil against me and thee. I have never seen such an act outside of dreams. (Dreams I paid four fifty to be) "Please turn to page 358 for a list of the Blah, blah, blah, yak, yak, yak..." By now I have listed and catalogued my complaints in my mind, I suppose I keep them for a day that will not come. (That day I will tell the world how I really feel) But then, I think that maybe it isn't quite as bad as all that. I mean, Yesterday I held a sunrise, Free of charge. And when I finished the book I knew that light still burned in my own eyes. Clint Thompson BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Introverted Psyche I frivolously disdain my outward appearence, Frequently subsiding to the injections of eternal thought. Crumbling slowly, logically at first, then wild, Stumbling, bumbling out of reality. My first reaction was no - no way! Then I accepted the tedious chore and Threw - it - away. You know what I don't care peace of mind is satisfaction enough. Life is cruel and I deserve it. I will strive to be levelheaded and full of meaning. Meaning is substance constant, relative thoughts, those which make us whole. Those that live and bleed. The beast is inside us, exorcise the beast and you're in. Only excessive force binds my style. I realize I extrude, and I retort inwardly, instantly. *Damian* BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Enclave: 3 Poems By David Trosty ------------------------------------------------- Theme to an Imaginary Drama Sometimes traveling through the city I see faces all alone. Sad faces standing in the shadows, abandoned, on their own. Vicious city, without compassion. Cold concrete, hard as stone. Unforgiving and uncaring, will make you calloused to the bone. Tired faces, lined with ashes, cracked and worn, they show their age. Acting helpless to solicit, the sidewalk is their stage. Huddled quietly, under the streetlight, holding in their deepest rage. To them, life's an empty book. It doesn't help to turn the page. Homelessness is a disease, and the cure can't come to soon. People waiting, slowly suffering, looking for a bottle before noon. Sometimes I give them the change they ask for, because I'd want to get drunk too, If I was like them and had to live here, In this awful concrete zoo. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The Hunter They call me the hunter, it's a very fitting name. 'Cause I'm always on the prowl for the essence of the earth. It seems my search never ends, eternally I hunt. There's not enough lush bounty, to fill every wanting hand. All people that I know, they play this very game. Desiring unmentionables, a vain attempt to ease their pain. What is it about desire, that plagues most every man. To taste the sweet pure nectar, makes him only want much more. All pleasures seem to have the power, to hypnotize from within. One can see it in all eyes, a cold and empty gaze. The cessation of reality, comes strong, and then it fades. Like the tides upon the sea, and the crashing of the waves. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 28,000 feet above civilization Checkerboard grids patchwork quilt. Someone lives there. Connected by barely perceptible threads each island has a way off, and on to every other. Country isolation, secluded peace, sometimes broken by colonies of stone and flesh. The social animal demonstrates its paradoxical tendencies. Some of them, insecure with isolation, huddle together. Afraid to be alone in this vast and desperate world-- yet afraid of each other. In their clustered colonies they walk about, their eyes darting nervously away from the others, apprehensive when they connect out on the street. (c) David Trosty, 1994 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Unneeded Technology ----------------- ----------------- Brought to a place too soon temptation It creates a home for itself desire Soon, the people will want it compulsion Those with the money take it envy Those who are poor steal it crime Luxury has a price to be paid sin --Andrew DeSplinter BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 The Fate of Ethnic Diversity Bit by bit, one person at a time, my heritage is being diluted by my own generation. The stories that we were taught are being neglected and forgotten. What will the next generation know of its past? What lessons will they learn, and where will they come from? We have all fought too hard against blood-thirsty foes too let ourselves dissolve into humanity at large until the sweetness of our ancestors' philosophies is too watered-down to taste. Will the children of the future benefit or suffer from the breakdown of barriers that have long stood like great pinnacles in the desert, slowly eroding until they can no longer support their own weight and they crumble into a pile of rubble. I have heard them crashing to the ground. It is not too late for us to pick up the pieces and re-examine them and tell our children what we have learned. --David Trosty, 1994. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 IMPURE MATHEMATICS By Rodrigo de Almeida Siqueira Wherein it is related how that polygon of womanly virtue, young Polly Nomial (our heroine) is accosted by that notorious villain Curly Pi, and factored (oh, horror!!). Once upon a time (1/t) pretty Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now, Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient, and made her way amongst the complex elements. Rows and columns closed in from all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a singular point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point, she tripped over a square root that was protruding from the ERF and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-euclidean space. She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking innerproduct. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, was she still convergent? He decided to integrate improperly at once. Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and dissipative terms that he was bent on no good. "Arcsinh," she gasped. "Ho, ho," he said. "What a symmetric little asymptote you have. I can see your angles have a lot of secs." "Oh sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on." "Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator. "Your fears are purely imaginary." "i,i," she thought,"perhaps he's not normal but homologous." "What order are you?" the brute demanded. "Seventeen," replied Polly. Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on." "Of course not," Polly replied quite properly; "I'm absolutely convergent." "Come, come," said Curly. "Let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit." "Never," gasped Polly. "Abscissa," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places and began smoothing out her points of inflection. Poor Polly. The Algorithmic Method was now her only hope. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever. There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly's radius squared itself; Polly's loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed Runge-Cutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. Curly went on operating until he had satisfied her hypothesis, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal. When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places. But it was to late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly's denominator increased monotonically. Finally she went to l'Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation. The moral of our sad story is this: "If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom ..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 ________________________________________________ AN EAGLE SPEAKS ON EVOLUTION ) ___________________________________________)---- _____________________________________) _____________________________) ______________________) It's a story eagles have always told, But humans are just again learning to hear it. It's a story from back when the dragons ruled And bigger was known to be better: Bigger and tougher and more armored against all Even life, those were the standards: Might made right; the strong got stronger And the big just got bigger and bigger. That's like the story the humans tell; But as humans tell it, it goes nowhere: Things changed, and the dragons simply perished. But the story the eagles tell is different, The story humans are just learning to hear. The way the eagles tell it, some of the little dragons, Little in some ways, but strong in their own way, Began to change too. They gave up on the claws and armor; And their claws grew long and delicate and fragile, And their scales became long, soft and fluffy. How the big dragons laughed! Har! Har! thundered the thunder-dragons, As the soft little lizards hopped and flapped along Little soaring leaps to avoid being clawed and bashed Trampled and smashed by the heavy armored feet. But the webbing claws and the feathering scales Continued to lengthen even as the thunder-dragons Continued to laugh their thunderous laugh, repeating the wisdom: Bigger is better; might makes right; nothing succeeds Like success: bigger claws and thicker scales-- Think of that now, says the eagle, As you watch me ride the shatter of light Up the face of the mountain. Think of that as you strain to see the cranes A mile up with their great transcontinental wingbeat, Or follow the dart and swoop of the swallow. Think of that as you look for your way In a world going mad with bigness, toughness, armor. --George Sibley BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Martian Safari By H.G. Emert From the conservation of water to the way he must dress, everything is very different here. Musing over the difference between his present location and his personal stretch of North Carolina beach front on Earth, Major Graham Wilson kicks at the crusty, red soil of this foreign world, stirring up dust that quickly falls back to the surface. Graham's mandatory environmental suit has a way of distorting his body into an almost unrecognizable, squat form with tubular appendages for arms and legs. Graham is uncertain he would recognize his own picture; of course the title "Boss-man" painted on his helmet by his crew does make him stand out among the generic vanilla suits. Major Wilson is the commanding officer for the geological survey team assigned to map and sample this portion of Mars for the largest mining conglomerate on Earth. After offering to finish packing up the remaining equipment for his men, Graham stands alone on the surface enjoying a few precious moments of solitude. His crew is probably spending the extra time on the communications link before the transmission window to Earth closes. The video messages sent to their families will take several minutes to arrive at their destination; Graham imagines the messages as bottled slices of time thrown into space and destined for a distant shore. "Major Wilson?" The voice of the dispatcher over the speaker in his helmet interrupts Graham's daydreams of ancient sailing vessels. Graham replies once the microphone in his helmet is open to transmit. "Yes, Trevor, I'm here; what's the problem?" "Sir, we are looking at fifty-nine minutes until night phase, and you have a long drive back. It's going to get cold out there. Last night it got down to minus one hundred and fifty-three celsius; the temperature could dip even lower tonight. Some of the equipment you are hauling can't take the cold as well as your environmental suit. Control encouraged me to..." "Control," Graham states breaking into Trevor's dialogue, "wants you to talk me into hurrying back to the Base before their equipment freezes solid. It figures that they are worried more about the condition of the equipment; nobody down there gives a darn about the people that drag this stuff around thousands of square miles of charred sulfur and silt traps." "Yes sir, but you know they don't like it when you, I mean, anyone stays out on the surface alone." "Fine, I'll finish up here and be on my way soon. Trevor, please don't forget to tell Control not to worry about me; I'll be fine, Wilson out." "Trevor, I mean, Base M-32 out." In slow, jerky motions which he never feels accustomed to, Graham packs up the remaining measuring devices, meters and equipment. Graham's body mass requires the same amount of effort to move about as it does on Earth, even though he currently weighs only forty percent of his earth-weight, which can lead to some very awkward moments. Graham brushes off the dust after climbing into the large, open four-wheel drive transport that is very similar to his own dune-buggy. Reminded of the beaches at home, Graham wonders how the martian sand would feel between his toes. That, however, is impossible. This hauntingly elegant landscape does not allow for the type of indulgences Graham enjoys. In the daylight, the surface is an impressionistic finger painting in vibrant shades of red, black, orange and brown; mammoth shield volcanos envelope the horizon; the view is breath- taking. Lacking much of an atmosphere the temperature plummets after sunset from a balmy minus ten to overnight lows in the negative one hundred and sixty degree range. With deep shadows to hide large boulders or ravines, Mars is left a cold, dark, dangerous, nightmare of a world. Starting up his vehicle, Major Wilson heads for Base as the sun begins to set. Like a large luminescent coin disappearing into a child's piggy bank, the sun falls slowly behind the mountains, lacking the multi-colored spectacle of an Earth sunset. Even with the starkness of the scenery, it irritates Graham that this planet is considered no more than a rock that will be raped of every mineral of value. Graham releases a deep sigh; "This has to stop," He said talking to himself; "I'm really getting depressed. What I need is a vacation or, at the very least, a diversion from all of this." The switch quickly opens Graham's microphone once again. "M-32, are you on line?" Graham called, "Trevor, are you still there?" "Yes sir," Trevor responds. "I need some traveling music, and this blasted buggy doesn't have a decent stereo." "But sir," Trevor protested, "it's against regulations, and we got into deep trouble the last time I did that for you." "Control deprived me of my few precious moments of solitude. the least they can do is allow me some tunes to tool on home by. So come on, Trevor," Graham said sternly; "You know what I want, and I live much closer to you than those number crunchers down at Control, so please, just do it." As the shadows cast by the cart lengthen into distorted, dark shapes that sweep over the ground, Graham's head begins to bob up and down inside his fish-bowl helmet with the first sweet notes of his favorite tune. With the "pedal to the metal," Graham drives into the sunset with the music soothing the realities of today by reviving memories of yesterday. "Let's go surfin' now, everybody's learning how, come on and safari with me..." BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 R U S H By Daniel Frederick It was getting closer. With every second that slowly passed it was getting closer. This was nothing like I had wanted. All I could do was scream. My legs wouldn't even move anymore. They were solid lead and my body was still attached to each leg, my own fleshy ones gone. A demonic dark shape only some forty feet away was approaching me in slow motion. What ever had happened to my legs was nothing compared to lying on top of all these spiders. Thousands of them crawling on me, even into my mouth. I could feel each of their millions of legs as they danced over my bare body. Now that shape was in my vision, and I could see that it too was a large hideous spider. It was almost upon me. I tried to crawl with my arms, but they wouldn't move either because of the amount of poison the spiders had stung me with. It seemed all I could do now was lay frozen by poison and fear in this spider hell. My eyes were unable to close from the sight of tiny legs on my eyelids. My vision was slowly darkening and I thanked the supposed gods that my family had always praised. Take me away from here. Life was closing in on me, and I no longer cared that I was dying or that thousands of legs crawled over me looking for anywhere to bite or walk. It was a feeding frenzy from hell. It was almost over and I sat back content to die. My will was gone and my mind wandering. I had forgotten the looming shape. I was almost gone when I suddenly became all too aware of it again. Why couldn't I have died now that I was so close to peace. I was in its grip, my body slowly swaying and dead. Seeing it clearly now, I saw its thousands of eyes staring hungrily at me. Its hairy long legs held me up to its mouth pincers. Death awaited me. WAIT, MY GUN. If I could reach it. My arms--I needed to move them. I had to. Scared out of my mind in this insane hell, I became horribly mad. It couldn't do this to me. It was going to kill me. I pulled for the .48, jabbed its muzzle under those staring eyes, and pulled the trigger. It hurt. My fingers could hardly move, but even with impaired vision I knew I had not missed. I could see and hear its horrible cry through my eyelids and the tiny legs as it threw me back violently. As I fell, the .48 fell from my limp fingers. The blast of the gun and howl of the spider rang in my ears like a grenade going off in an empty room. The queasy sensation of spiders in my stomach and mouth gagged me. I could no longer breathe and my eyes were bugging painfully out of my head. Agony! Somehow I was screaming. How? Screaming and gagging and crying. Then . . . God I'm sorry I had nothing left. --- --- --- Immediately after their partner was shot, Officers Jonson and Rean made it to him. They had been only fifteen feet away from him. Only fifteen feet away from helping him. Now Driscoll was dead. Another good cop dead from another drug using scum. The damn high was more important to them then even life. Their life or anyone else's life killed by drug scum. "Ahhh, the ultimate rush to death." I hope he enjoyed it, the damn scum. Well there is nothing left to do now but dispose of them both. "God, I hate the smell of dead spider, but I suppose we all smell this way when dead," Jonson remarked as he kicked the scum with five of his six legs. BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 Eye Opener By Russell Hutchison The dark cloak of sleep was pulled slowly away from Eric's eyes and mind. He knew something was happening, something important, but he felt as if he was trying to think through a black gauze bandage. The young boy opened one of his eyes, his half-gaze fell upon a small, dark, hunched shape, with multiple, blazing red eyes, squatting well within his arms reach. Panic started to build in Eric's chest with a warm pressure and a heady, almost fuzzy feeling gripped his still groggy mind as adrenaline kick started his thoughts. At the same time the creature's unseen jaws snapped shut. Eric hardly noticed that he screamed as he slammed his back into the wall behind his bed, trying, by force of will, to merge with the wall or grind a path to safety through it with his shoulder blades. The creature, which seemed to be smaller than a toaster, didn't even flinch. Eric's vision finally cleared and in the weak moonlight he found himself staring at the glowing face of his new digital clock. He stared at it a while longer while his breathing returned to normal and his hands began to shake slightly. The sound of foot steps approaching his closed door and his mother's voice calling his name helped to calm him down. The door was pushed open and the vague shape of his mother's head poked through the dark rupture. "Eric, honey, are you alright?" Eric could hear the worry in his mother's voice and the sound of her hand sliding across the wall, vainly searching for the light switch. He closed his eyes, waiting for his vision to become red. "I'm fine, mom." Eric heard the heavy, ponderous footsteps of his barrel-chested father coming closer. "I had a bad dream, and the clock scared me." "We heard you scream," his mom said. There was a sharp click and the insides of Eric's eyes glowed red. "Yeah, I thought the clock was a monster, it scared me." "Awful short monster," said his father from the hall. His balding head visible in the light spilling over the mother's shoulder into the hall. "I don't think you have anything to worry about, son." A yawn contorted his face into the visage of a man in pain. "Good night, pup." The father disappeared from view. "Good night, dad." "Good night, Eric. Get some sleep, you have school tomorrow." "Yes, mom. I love you." Eric looked back at the clock, making sure that it was really a clock. A small tag was taped to the clock. It read: "Happy eleventh birthday! Love ya bro', Mike." There was a click and the room was draped in darkness once again. Only the glowing numbers on the clock were visible as his eyes adjusted back to the moonlight. Eric watched the time change from 1:10 A.M. to 1:11, and his night vision had almost completely returned. But the horror, when, in the crystalline silence left in the wake of his parent's departure, the sound of the monster's jaws snapping shut sounded from the far side of the room. Eric tore his gaze from the glowing machine and tried, fruitlessly, to spot the creature. But the moonlight pooling on the floor made the section of the room between the window and the light as black as pitch. Young Eric was about to call to his parents again when the sound happened again. But this time he knew the source. Someone was bouncing pebbles off his window. Eric hopped out of bed and walked quietly to the window. Pressing his face against the cool, clear glass he saw his best friend, Paul, waving to him from the ground, one floor down. Wasting no time, Eric put on warm clothes that were warm and dark in color. He then slipped out his bedroom door and took his usual path, the one where he knew all the squeaky floor- boards to the front door. He checked to make sure he had the key in his pocket before he closed the door. While he did this Paul had come around the corner of the house, moving in the shadows around the base of the house. The two boys held their greetings until after the door was closed and they had safely crossed the street into a greenbelt between the neighbor's yards. Eric slapped Paul on his shoulder, "You dork, you scared the hell out of me! I thought Mike's clock was a monster ... for a second." "It's good to see you, too. I sneak out of my house, risk getting grounded for life by seeing you, all just to say happy birthday, and you slap me because your rapist brother's clock scares you. Gawd, what a jerk!" Paul, with arms akimbo, fixes Eric with a gaze of mock hurt. "I'm sorry about hitting you, but I was scared ... and don't talk like my brother is bad. He's my family ... even if he was guilty. And how can you say bad stuff about him when he used to play with us both all the time?" "I guess my mom is rubbing off on me. She still forbids me to see you. I guess she thinks that you'll turn out bad too, and you'll pull me down with you. She says that you only care about him because you've never known a female who was raped." "Bull, I know what I feel! Your mom is full of it!" "Who cares anyway? I just want to go stealthin'. We haven't done that since Mike's trial." "Yeah, lets go. I ... I need to be moving or something." The two boys started to play their game of stealthin', and after twenty minutes of dodging and hiding from cars and people Eric's humor returned. But then, while they were hiding in a bush, the faint sound of Paul's mom calling his name drifted to their silent hiding place. "Oh no! I gotta go! I'll see you later, Eric," Paul jumped up from behind the bush, startling a group of college kids who were heading home from last call. "Take care!" whispered Eric, but Paul was long gone. When the students had passed he stood up and decided that it would be best to go home. He began to sneak his way from bush to bush, and car to car. He only had a few blocks to go and was cutting through a greenbelt when he noticed the dark shape of someone walking into the other end. The person was stumbling around, drunk, and since he was already hidden, Eric thought that he would stay behind a bush and wait until the person was gone. As the dark figure got closer he could tell it was a woman. Then, a large figure burst from the bushes, followed by two more. The first shadow tackled the woman with a shoulder in the small of her back. Eric heard the breath burst from her lungs as she hit the ground. Then the other two shadows swarmed over her. He watched as they cursed at her, wrapping their hands around her throat, hit her, tore her clothes. All the time he could hear the woman's sobs, labored breathing, and choked off pleas to be released. Eric was shaking, he knew he had to do something. Everything was so terrible that he felt like he was watching T.V. Then it occurred to him that, if it was T.V. then he couldn't get hurt. All he would have to do is yell or something, then the shadows would leave. Slowly he stepped around the side of the bush. The dark pile of people was making strange noises and saying words that only older kids used before they fought. Eric tried to yell but he couldn't while looking at the writhing pile. He looked up and tried to keep away the sounds by covering his ears. "Go away," he said, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. "GO AWAY!" his shriek tore the muffled comments of the shadows into silence. "GO AWAY!" He yelled again. Eric was starting to feel panic, like he was watching the dark monster again, but this time it was moving. This time it was saying words, words that he couldn't understand. They were quiet, deep in tone and spoken quickly. It's voice was like a hypnotic spell that was placing the black gauze back around his mind. Then a small whimper, from a female voice, escaped from under the monster. The spell was broken and Eric inhaled to scream again. But the monster struck and the world flashed bright as the sun, then faded to darkness. When he woke it was still dark. There was no sign of the monster or the woman, except for a piece of clothing or two. Eric couldn't see out of one eye and his face ached with heat and pain. He ran the rest of the way home, racing through the neighborhood like something was chasing him. He threw open his door and rushed through his house. As he ran, a long yell began to leave his throat. He shoved open his door, slamming it into the wall. In three steps he was on top of the monster squatting by his bed. He grasped it by the tail and whipped it against the nightstand over and over, screaming. "I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU..." finally the monster shattered in his grasp. Eric dropped to the ground and began to cry. The world flared white and a pair of arms grabbed his shoulders. It was his mother. "What's wrong, what are you doing?!" Eric looked down at his hand, where an electrical cord was clenched instead of a tail. A tag reading: "Happy eleventh birthday! Love ya bro', Mike" lay in the wreckage of the clock. "I never want to see Mike again," Eric whispered. "He's a monster." "What happened to your face?" "The Monster bit me." BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 The Man in the Ice by Mark T. McMeans The man in the ice occupied a small vacant corner of the bus station. It was night and the station empty, unusual for the summer season. No one had heard him that day, and in typical fashion he had drifted off to dream- less sleep. He awoke to the sound of someone nearby. Looking up, he saw a stunning young lady kneeling at a newspaper rack just a few yards away. "Hello, who are you?" he said. She perked up as if she had caught a strange smell, and looked around giving him a better view. "You are beautiful!" he said with awe. She turned. "Who's there?" The man wasn't sure what he was seeing was true. "You hear me?" he asked wonderingly. "Yes. So unless you're gonna' mug me, come on out." "I wish it were that easy," he answered. "But see for yourself. I'm over here in the corner." Squinting, she peered in his direction. "Oh no! Not another man on ice!" she exclaimed. "This must be my lucky day," she mumbled walking away. No, wait!" he yelled. "You're the only one that can free me!" "Why's that?" she asked, turning. "Because you heard me. For two god-forsaken years, I've stood here, calling and no one has ever heard me. But, today, you came along, and, and we can communicate. You must be my answer!" She was curious, but her face revealed skepticism. "What are you doing here?" she asked, after a pensive pause. "I came here to get a ticket out of town," he said, "but before I could board the bus, I found myself trapped in this ice." She regarded him with raised brows, one hand stroking her chin. "What were you leaving town for?" she asked. He paused. He knew the answer, but he wasn't sure he wanted to share it with this lady. For some reason she made him nervous. And yet, he had to be free. "To get away," he said. "The time had come for me to be a man, to grow up, but I couldn't do it. I ran." "From what?" "My past," he laughed, a sad sound. "And my future." As he spoke, his face grew somber. "I never felt important as a child, a gift from parents too busy keeping up with the Jones, I suppose. When I came of age, the only thing I had a hold on was my insecurity. I was afraid, didn't think I could control my life. There I was, ready to step out on my own, all of that indiscernible frontier of life before me, and all I had to do was leave my past behind and become a man." He took a deep breath, gritting his teeth. "Only when that time came, I couldn't do it. I ran. And here you see me, frozen." "That's very sad." The way she said it, he found it hard to believe that she meant it. "But not now!" he exclaimed. "You've come, and you're the one who can free me!" "Boy, you're just full of lines, aren't you." "No, I mean it," he said trying to keep the desperation from his voice. "Everyday, hundreds of people come walking by here. They buy their tickets, board their buses, and live their lives. Sometimes they glance at me, but it's like they can't see me, or see me through a veil, like I'm not completely real to them, just a shadow. So they move on. I try to call them, and sometimes scream 'till I think I'll explode, but no one ever hears. "Then the seasons change," he continued. "Summer drifts into fall, and winter on its heels. The people lessen each day; the cold is too much for them. Those are the loneliest months. The only people I would see, then, are the occasional young lovers come to steal a moments privacy late in the night. "But now you've come, and you heard me and see me. I'm sure if you just try, you can save me. You're the one." "Hmmm..." she said, thoughtfully. "In spite of that, I can't help you." His heart dropped. "Why not?" "Because even though I may be the one, that doesn't mean you are. The last thing I need is a frozen man." Her words slapped his face. "What?" "You don't think you will thaw out overnight, do you?" Her question caught him off guard. "Believe me, you won't. I've seen this before, and it takes time to get back on your feet." "But you can't just leave me here!" "I won't. I'm gonna' board my bus. If you stay, that's you're choice." She turned to walk away. Before he could call out to her, she turned back. "You see, I had a rough childhood, as well. My father was very demanding. I'd even say jealous. He wanted me always to be his little girl, and didn't want to share me with anyone else. I lived a life of closed doors and high fences. When my time came, I chose to live differently. I promised myself I would never be contained by anyone again." She looked straight at him, her deep blue eyes piercing his. "That's why I don't have time for you." There was a long pause. "I don't know what to say," he muttered, ashamed. It was true, he had no right to make her his hero. He knew whose fault his being there was. "I'm sorry for bothering you," he managed finally. "It was nice speaking with you." "I'm sure," she said. She cocked her head sideways and looked at him again. "It must be tough going through life looking for someone to rescue you." "You don't know the half of it," he answered shaking his head. "You never told me your name." "My name?" He hated this. "I don't have one; I haven't earned it yet." "You are Unnamed? That explains it all." It was a great impropriety to ask of another while without, but he had to know who she really was. "Wh- what do they call you?" "Amanda," she answered, nonplussed by his impertinence. "It means 'lead into gold'." She looked at him then with more compassion than he thought her capable of. Then, wishing him good day, she turned and walked away. As he watched her leave, he felt the chill of the ice next to his skin. But inside, he felt a warmth, growing, like a rain of hot tears. He smiled. The water dripping from him had already formed a small puddle at his feet. Copyright (c) 1993 by Mark T McMeans BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 PROFIT MARGIN By Steven Peterson Coffee and cigarettes: as Ron reached for his Camels, he scorched his tongue on the icky-sweet flavored coffee his secretary had just brewed. Hot cherry and white chocolate flooded his throat as he tried to choke down the viscous fluid; his eyes began to water and his hands started to shake. Ron coughed and sent a perfect stream of java splashing down: a direct hit, right into the middle of his keyboard. Cursing silently, he stabbed the intercom button: --Marcy ... could you come here, my keyboard is down again. --I'll bring the spare ... Ron set down his mug and picked up the sodden keyboard. He began to shake the little brown droplets out onto the carpet, hoping to cover his slop before Marcy arrived. She'd been after him for months to get used to his new "secretary," and this was the third unit he'd trashed this month. It was starting to look deliberate, and the man upstairs had his "quota" of time "on-line" to measure, quantify, digitize, whatever they did with the little blips when Ron was done with them. He was glaring at the screen when Marcy entered: --What happened, Ron ... ashes or fluids? She had the spare keyboard tucked under one arm; Ron thought it looked like some sort of new appendage, perhaps the wing she was using to fly away. --Coffee again, Marcy. That thing's a damn magnet. --Well, scoot out of the way, and I'll have you back up again in just a minute. Really, Ron ... you'd better get used to it being there. --Yeah, I know. Say, could you bring up those new sales forms for me? I keep getting lost in the windows. Marcy began to trace the cord to the back of the machine. Her movements had a confidence that Ron had never really noticed before. Ron started to thumb through his ancient rolodex, looking for his first calls of the day. Marcy stood up, tapped a few keys, and fixed Ron with a cold look: --There you go. Now which form did you want? --Carlson's little gem. It's called sp or spr94 or something. --O.K., watch ... Marcy grabbed the mouse and began pointing and clicking. --First, get out of this directory ... As Marcy droned on, throwing acronyms and clipped references at Ron, he thought back to his first regional spring sales campaign. Marcy had just started working for him, so fresh out of high school he could smell the bubblegum on her breath. He ran her like a dog, another order damn near every hour. And she had kept coming back for more. He missed that loyalty, those trusting quiet eyes. --O.K., now you're in the dbase ... God, he had power back then. Ron had owned his own region, sales were booming, and a man's personal secretary worked for him, not some damn machine. Marcy was staring at him, waiting: --Yeah, that's the one. How do I send them again? --Just like anything else, Ron, hit Control-Z and Enter. Marcy glanced out the door, then back at Ron. --Anything else? --Um, yeah, if you could get me the southeast Indiana figures from last year, I could get on the horn and maybe accomplish something. --I'll forward them right away. --No, no ... on paper, Marcy. I need the whole screen. --O.K., Ron, let me fire up the printer. Ron watched Marcy make her way out the door, quietly lusting after the Old Marcy, the girl he could manipulate. It had been years, but Ron still remembered the soft tenderness of his old conquest. Her quiet ease with numbers, with so-called logic, had changed everything. At first, that skill had made her valuable (Ron hated math); ultimately, it gave her the upper hand. Carlson was looking to promote her right out of the building; West Coast was looking for bright minds ... Ron fired up a Camel and reached for his dog-eared rolodex. Flipping through, he stopped on a new one: fresh meat. Ron picked up the phone and started dialing, his fingers stabbing the buttons as he rifled through a pile of paper. In the background, a printer began its furious ticking and whirling. * * * After a fruitless morning of cold calls, Ron had to face Carlson. The young turk of management, Carlson was obsessed with the machines. From his desk, he could monitor all the sales reports from the building as they were entered; everything was defined on his screen. The meeting was, of course, in his office: lots of chairs arranged in a web pattern around the terminal, a blinking cursor ready to reveal the frozen figures of a month's work. --Ron. I'm glad you're here early. I've been meaning to talk to you, I haven't seen you logged on much lately. Come on, old man, everybody's got to be part of the team. Let's face it ... nobody, not even you, can make sense out of that pile of dead trees on your desk. HQ wants it all digital, and if you can't get it online, Ron, you're going to be history. --Right, Carlson. All the ram in the world can't give you my contacts, my reputation. Twenty-five year's worth. Look, kid, HQ doesn't want me swingin' over to the other side, so save your empty threats. The other agents began to filter in. The monthly meetings had changed. All the ladies who used to remain safely behind their Selectrics had arrived, invading Ron's old domain and threatening his margin with their aggressive forays into his territory. Carlson's monitor beeped and he began: --Good to see everybody. I've been watching, and I'm pleased to say that most of you have posted good numbers. Most of you even found the new form. Keep using it for now, I'll post an updated version after the spring season. As you all know, the secretarial pool will only be available on a limited basis from now on. So get used to those keyboards, men. These ladies are too valuable on the lines; they're not going to correct your grammar forever. Speaking of ladies ... congratulations Marcy, you win the bonus for this month: Marcy posted the best numbers, part or full time. --Thanks, Mr. Carlson. Our product sells itself, really. Carlson beamed, his latest convert shining brightly. --Mr. Carlson, I want you to know, I didn't make it happen on my own. Ron laid the groundwork in that area ... and your form kept me on track. Ron glanced at Marcy, then down at the floor. Carlson tapped a few keys, grabbed his mouse, and started clicking away. In a moment, he found what he wanted and swiveled the monitor around. On the screen, a chart listed the active areas and the numbers for last month, last year, and the averages for the last ten years. Ron noticed his territory was now called C-12: --Carlson, them old numbers are a lie. The law of averages don't obey you or anyone else. You can't expect us to maintain a quota based on a different time, a different world. --Ron, I hear you. Those numbers are for me. Do your best to hit the target. We need you on the team; don't worry about it. --Then stop breathing down my neck for those damn forms. I'll do my job ... the way I've been doing it for the last twenty-five years. --Relax, Ron. The machine is just another tool. And since we're all using it, the least you could do is try and join the rest of the world. Marcy tried to shrink into the background. Open conflict still made her nervous, and she thought Ron was making a fool of himself; a dinosaur stomping in the tar. She couldn't help feeling a little sorry for the old man, he had shown her so much. --Look, Ron, I don't care how much coffee you dump on your keyboard, that unit stays in your office. Get used to it. And just so you know, I drafted Marcy's transfer orders to San Jose this morning ... she won't be replaced. Starting next month, you fly on your own, buddy. Ron looked stricken as the news sank in. Marcy nervously shook the glad- hands and avoided looking at Ron. Her old hero was on his way down, and she felt a twinge of guilt. After all, she had done more than her share to bring the master dbase online. But, then again, Ron had used her, in many ways. Marcy steeled herself and leveled a gaze at Ron: --Thanks, Ron. For everything. I know you'll be O.K., you don't need me. --Well, I guess that's that, Marcy. Good luck. * * * The spring campaign was winding down, and Ron was alone in his office. His numbers were terrible, and he was stuck in some directory. No coffee, no Marcy, and no more mousing around. Ron flicked the switch on his power-strip, and grabbed a pen and his trusty legal pad. He slapped the keyboard on top of his monitor, cleared a space on his desk, and began dialing in a last-ditch effort: --Ralph, old boy, it's Ron. Can we talk? I know you've been buying from SunStar lately, but I need a favor. I need to move some product, and I'm ready to call a few in. --Ron, you sound desperate ... and I wish I could help, but things just ain't the same. Schumann would have a cow if I made someone reprogram the invoice code. --Invoice Code! Christ, Ralph, did you just say Invoice Code? Don't tell me they've gotten to you, too. What the hell is the point, anyway? --Beats me, Ron. Twenty years ago, they told us to send our kids to MIT. Now, them kids are runnin' us through the better mousetrap. Go figure ... --Yeah, don't I know it. See you at the club tonight? --Not tonight, Ron. Gotta go. Ron hung up and tried another number: --Hello, John Farris, please. --I'm sorry, Mr. Farris no longer works here. Would you care to speak to another member of our staff? --No. What happened to Farris? --He retired last month, I think. If you're interested, I could connect you to his replacement, Mr., ah, what did you say your name was ... --Forget it. Ron placed the headset on his shoulder and lit another Camel. After brooding for a moment, he got up to make some real coffee, none of that sweet stuff. There was a new girl at Marcy's old desk; she pointedly ignored Ron as he measured the grounds and water. Her monitor beeped, and she clicked to attention. E-mail from Carlson Central, no doubt. While he waited for his java to brew, Ron tried to make small talk: --How goes the battle? --Excuse me, did you say something? --Yeah, how goes it? If you'd like some good numbers, let me know ... I can dig some out. --No, that's O.K., Mr. Carlson has me working from the updated list. Thanks, anyway. She turned back to her screen, oblivious to Ron's lurking presence. She was young, as Marcy had once been. But this one was untouchable, as alien to Ron as the Inventory Code. * * * May 15th, the end of the spring season. It was a bright, cool day and Ron was spiking his coffee with some very old brandy. He fixed his gaze on the blinking cursor and raised his mug: --A toast ... to progress, march on. Carlson was on his way down; the machine had crunched all of his numbers, and Ron's time was up. On his pad, in longhand, Ron had prepared his resignation. Why not. It was over: the boys were deep down in Florida, the kids owned it all now. Ron picked up his old rolodex, leaned back in his chair, and began plucking cards from the spindle. One by one, he flipped them into the trashcan, a vacant smile on his face. Copyright (c) 1994 by Steven Peterson BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4*BESTOF93/4 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ICS would like to hear from you. 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