Eye on the Web: The Not So Cyber Savvy

Andrea Dudrow

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The Web is everywhere; this we know. The New Yorker has more ads these days for so-called dot-coms than for pashminas; and half the billboards I see on the street are for online-only ventures, things like electronic party invitation services, Web-based money managers, and grocery delivery businesses. Presumably a fair number of people visit these sites, and use these services. Indeed, in wired San Francisco, where I’m lucky enough to afford the rent, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t have an e-mail address, who’s never shopped online, who isn’t connected, somehow, to the Web. None the less, as I’ve spent the better part of the week being reminded, not everyone is connected to the Internet, and not everyone who is connected is Internet-savvy.
So today I’ve decided to entertain you with a few sad tales of Internet misadventures and mishaps in the hopes that a little reality check will remind us all that what we call the World Wide Web is not so global yet, and the audiences we think have had years to get used to the Internet may just be getting started.
Our first tale is a common one and takes us to the fast-paced world of New York City. The sister of a good friend of mine is a successful New York author, with a monthly gig writing for the Economist, and a recently accepted book proposal that may even lead to appearances on the talk show circuit. In short, she’s got a firm handle on the world as it works today, and is the kind of person you’d expect to be technologically savvy, to easily avoid the pitfalls of Internet hoaxes. Which is why my friend was so surprised to receive a forwarded e-mail message from his sister informing him that anyone who forwarded it, in turn, to eight more people would receive a free cell phone from Nokia (or was it Ericcson?).
Many of us have seen similar messages (does anyone remember when Microsoft and AOL had supposedly teamed up and wanted us to test out some new software for them? Anyone who used it, and forwarded on the message, was promised $500). Of course those of us familiar with the way e-mail and the Internet work know that there’s no way of tracing how many people you forward a message to, much less of finding out where to send the free phone, or the check for $500. I actually find this comforting. But, I think it’s important for us all to remember that this lack of understanding and scrutiny is still rampant among Internet users, and the things some of us think will be obvious, may be slightly less so.
Another friend of mine, a confirmed Luddite living among the cyber-aware of San Francisco, recently asked me to do her a favor, since I have a Web connection. “Next time you’re at your computer, print me out a list of publishers in the city,” she said. Well, I thought, I could search for the names of publishers and paste them into a Word document and print that, or I may be able to find them on the site of the people who put out those Writer’s Market guides. But I suspected that this was not what she had in mind, that she conceived of the Internet as one big reference manual that someone had thoughtfully assembled for the benefit of the information-starved masses.
My suspicion was confirmed when, after her first experience on the Web, she called me to complain that it wasn’t half the helpful resource she had always heard it to be. Apparently, while searching for a list of bed and breakfasts in San Francisco, she had typed into the browser’s address bar “www.sanfranciscobedandbreakfasts.com” and was disconcerted to find that nothing came up. The search engines were no help either, as they returned so many hits that were dead ends. Not understanding that the Web grew up in an ad hoc way, and doesn’t have a gatekeeper responsible for maintaining its usefulness, she decided the Internet was not for her.
A similar fate befell my sister, who, after years of me haranguing her to check out the Web, finally got a hotmail account to stay in touch with her boyfriend in Washington while she vacationed in Los Angeles. Unfortunately the candidness written communication often evokes caused a break-up within four messages, and the mere prospect of receiving e-mail from me is not enough to keep her interested in the wide world of online communication.
The moral of these stories is, I think, that no matter how many people have been using the Internet for years, just as many are only getting started. The further technology takes us, the more people are left behind when it becomes too evolved for them to comfortably pick it up. Even those who do use the Internet regularly are not necessarily scrutinizing, or cynical, enough to discern the gems from the dreck. Though we should continue to take technology as far as we can, to try new things, and find new ways of transferring information; we should also continue to be aware of our audience, and not create a divide between what we want the Web to do and the people we want to use it.
Read more by Andrea Dudrow.