OCR Text |
Show l(tNAMI ~ ANYOODY COMMENTARY Computers are like teen sex Censorship in cyberspaaaaace! Aside from fear of technology (one of the most ensible phobias of our time), 1 think we're stuck with the wrong metaphor. One more story about access problems and potholes on the information highway and we're all going to overdose. During the weekend, Heather Florence of the Association of American Publishers told that august body that computers are more like teen-age sex than anything else. Everybody talk about computers all the time without knowing much. Everybody thinks that everybody el is further along than they are. N obody does it very much or very well. But they w ill get better. The captain of the publishing industry were suitably grateful for this insigh t. The trouble with this dandy new comm unications technology is that while it enables people to communicate li ke whizzes, it doesn't give them anything more interesting to say. Like most human conversation, it will eventually revolve primarily around the weather and foo tball. A lot of folks out there surfing the Net don't have the sense God gave gravel, and they aren't any more interesting to bear from than they ever were. When the In ternet was started in 1969, it was a military tool designed to help control nuclear attacks. Lf a particular site wa bombed, it had to continue to operate from other sites, so multiple entry points were critical to the system. As Tommi Chen points out in a brief hi tory in Business T ime , the next phase of the Internet's development wa when the acad mic and research communities jumped on it, and again, the Internet's openness was their key criterion. It ensured that the Internet was easy to connect to and promoted the free exchange of information. Until about 1990, the Internet was designed for adults only, which is ironic when you hear how many people now swear that kids born after 1969 have some gen that the re t of us are missing that enables them to play the computer like Van Cliburn. Then came the bulletin-board community, with groups popping up like mushrooms to share their passion for tropical fi h or whatever. And now the Net is being commericializ d, alway a orry sp ctacle, as greed-heads sit around figuring out bow to cash in on the ph n menon. Quite naturally, the purveyors of porn hav leape nght on it, and a if that weren 't depressing en ugh, th U.S. Congress, which has the collective computer literacy you might expect a bunch of 55year-old oral-fixated extrovert , now propo e to fix thi or u . Sen. James Exon, D-Neb., hopped up with a bill to outlaw "indecency " on the Internet, and our fearle I ader , eeing an issue with all the promise of the flag, motherhood and apple pie, hopped right after him. Tb bill has now been pa e out of committee and will shortly be loo e on the floor. Any possible chance it had of being enforced wa lo t when Exon wisely backed down on hi plan to make commercial service provider , such as America OnLine, responsible every time some 14-year-old decides to write dirty words on the collective bathroom wall . That, of cour e, would leave the law trying to police individual users, and good luck in that endeavor, there now being and estimated 30 million users worldwide. Because you have to go looking for sex on the Internet-it doesn't just pop up while you're trying to reach fellow members of the Heidegg r discussion group or people who adore Liszt's sonatasthe more sensible route is to use the blocking mechanisms already availabl on home and school computers used by children. Exon's bill contains language more restrictive than current court porn decisions, and that certainly has no application to users in Singapore or Sweden. Exon' s b ill would limit all adult users to material suitable for children, if it could be enforced, which it can't be. Now the question is: Do our elected representatives have the courage to admit that they don't know what they're doing? Are they willing to cast a vote that can - and inevitably will be portrayed by the Christian right during the next election as "in favor of on-line pornography"? And will the rest of us be smart enough to figure out that the Christian right is once more pushing a red herring? Because one of the constant of American political life is that our leaders underestimate our intelligence - instead of exercising their own intelligence by explaining how things really are to the underinformed - we are all caught in a vicious cycle of political debates getting dumb and dumber. So here's a dandy test for your own new members of Congress, or even your old ones: Are they willing to vote for something that every computer-literate person considers truly dumb, or do they have so little faith in your intelligence that they hope to counterfeit this as a ".notberhood vote" in the next election? WlTI\THIS SLOP? GARN LEBARON I COMMENTARY SUU badly n eeds technology boost How about those line at the Regi trar' Office each quarter. How much aper do SUU students waste on term pap r ? How much paper do the profe sor waste producing syllabi? These questions (among other ) can all be answered with a simple st atement: SUU la cks the technology it needs to be a good uni versity in the 1990s. Let's do t he "vision thing" and try to imagine what technology at SUU should allow student and professors to do1 o we can see some of the directions SUU neects to take in order to create a modern university. 1. Student ou gh t t o be able to register by t elephone. Lest you argue t hat students a re already able to register by phone, let's examine the contrast between SUU and any other modem university. At SUU, you are charged a fee, then you try to get through for hours. Once you get through, you talk to a live person who enters your registration information into a computer by hand. At a modem university, you get in on the first ring and the call is free. (You are often charged a fee for trying to register in person.) A computer welcomes you to the touch-tone registration system, where you enter your social security number and the numbers of the courses you want to take with your telephone keypad. 2. Student ought to be able to dial into the Internet from home. Research for college students has changed. Students across the country are now doing the bulk of their research by dialing into the Internet with their modems. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to sit in our homes and dorm rooms and go online? Sure would beat having to try and compete for space and time in one of the labs on campus, especially right before finals. 3. Professors ought to be able to conduct research and converse with colleagues around the world from their offices. Believe it or not, some of the professors on our campus still lack modern computers connected to the rest of the world. At most universities, professors conduct conversations, debates, and share research findings with other experts in their fields via email. 4. Students and professors ought to be able to cond u ct routi ne campu busine fr om their co mput er t erminal . Picture this scenario. Jill Freshman logs into the Registrar's Office from her home. She register for her classes by typing in her lections. When registration closes, the registrar's computer sends her class chedule to her E-mail box. When her classes ar paid for, the cashier's computer mails her a receip t. T he registrar' computer E-mail th cour e rolls, containing student E-mail addresses, to each professor on campus . Each professor can no w m ass mail th e c our se sylla bus and assignment sheets to each student in the class. Jill pulls the syllabus and course requirement fro m h er compute r, and dials into th e World Wi de Web to do som e research. A the cla s progresses, Jill E-mails her papers an d assignments to the professor. H er p rofessor corrects and grades the assignments and then mails them back. When the term is over, professors submit grades to the registrar through E-mail, and the registrar then E-mails Jill's grades to her mailbox. This is not a scenario of the future. It happens at many other universities on a daily basis, and it can happen here too. We need to make technology top priority at SUU. Any person on campus ought to be able to contact any other person on campus with an Email message. Students should be assigned E-mail addresses on the day they register as freshmen and automatically signed into a basic Internet class. Immediate attention needs to be given to the purchase of as many modems and phone lines as possible for the student server. It is far cheaper to let people dial into the server· from home than to try and provide enough labs and computers on campus in a futile attempt to meet student demand . There is clearly a critical mass of students with their own computers, so that modems and phone lines would subs tantially reduce pressure on campus labs. The technology is av ailab le righ t now at reasonable prices to make these services available. Let's make the investment and put in the effort to get our campus ready for the 21st century. |