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How Blitzmail Failed to Change My Lovelife
Brian
Cremins
University of Connecticut
Posted November 6,
2001 Student
Affairs Online, 2 (Fall)
Undergraduate culture on most college campuses poses an
interesting interpretive challenge for adults who fail to remember
their own experiences as college students. As a freshman English
instructor and academic advisor at the University of Connecticut for
the last several years, I have sometimes felt like Indiana Jones
trying to crack the code of some adolescent Temple of Doom.
One needs a grimoire not only to understand the spoken language of
first-year college students but also their visual language: the baggy
jeans, the silk-screened shirts, the platform shoes, not to mention
the earrings, the eyerings, facerings, and tonguerings. In the last
couple of years I have been interrupted again and again in the
classroom by the buzzing of cell-phones and beepers, which forces me
to ask the question:
What phone call could possibly be more important than a passage
from, say, Act I of Hamlet?
What I must keep reminding myself is that the world of the
first-year college student in 2001 is very different from the world I
faced as I sat in the corner of my freshman dorm room in Hanover, New
Hampshire ten years ago. Perhaps my experiences with the wonders of
Blitzmail, the pet name for Dartmouth College's electronic mail
system, will shed light on the technologically sophisticated world
our students now inhabit, a world which we "adults" have helped to
create.
First developed in late 1987, Dartmouth's
"Blitzmail" was one of the first electronic mail delivery systems
used on college campuses in the United States. The system created a
unique electronic culture within an already isolated, rarefied
environment. Hanover is a small town, and Dartmouth is a small
school, two hours from Boston, two hours from Springfield. It was a
place ripe for electronic experimentation and social engineering. In
order to facilitate our participation in this burgeoning online
community, Dartmouth required me and my fellow members of the class
of 1995 to purchase an Apple computers. Unlike some of my
technologically savvy classmates, however, in the fall of 1991 I had
never heard of an Apple Macintosh
or an e-mail, let alone something called "Blitzmail." I was saddened
to learn that my trusty electric Olympia typewriter, which had served
me so well in high school, would not be "Blitzmail compatible."
What happens when an incoming class of just over one thousand
students learn to communicate not face-to-face, but with the
assistance of a beeping, whirring middleman? You might imagine that
the culture which results is a cold, distant, forbidding one
resembling the shadowy lunar surfaces of the old TV show Space:
1999 (an unjustly forgotten show in which the moon breaks loose
from its orbit, taking Martin Landau and a troupe of other actors in
beige leisure suits on a journey through the Milky Way). But things
are never as simple as they appear to be on TV, especially trashy TV.
My fellow students and I were not only learning a new way of life as
first-year students but also a new means of communication. Today, of
course, most students take e-mail for granted much as those of us in
the class of 1995 took the telephone or Wonder Bread for granted. In
1991, those of us learning to use e-mail were technological pioneers.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let me give you some examples
from the past. I apologize in advance for the distortions of memory.
No harm is intended.
One evening during freshmen orientation week two twin boys who
lived across the hall from me coaxed me out of my room which, I now
recall, was about as big as a slightly cramped bread box. At dinner
that evening I met a young woman who stared at me from across a plate
of cold peas and mashed potatoes. I began to hear choirs and violins
in my head, and in the distance I could hear the faint echo of Frank
Sinatra singing, "Night and day - POW! - you are the one!" I was a
kid, she was a kid. After mutually determining that we were in the
same literature seminar, she finished her potatoes, gave me a wink,
and left the table.
"Blitz me," she said.
My new friends laughed. Their voices and their movements were as
identical as their faces.
I nervously walked home with my neighbors and tried to formulate a
plan of action. If I was going to win the heart of this young woman,
I would need an ally - a Robin to my Batman, an Abbot to my Costello,
a Lewis to my Clark. I would need an electronic Cupid to assist me in
this new Romantic adventure. I would need the aid of, to borrow a
name from Berke Breathed's comic strip "Bloom County", the Banana
Junior 2000, a/k/a my Macintosh Classic.
With Frank Sintara's Songs for Swingin' Lovers on my
stereo, I set to work.
First, I celebrated. Surely this wondrous new technology had been
invented for pale, shy fools like me who harbored a secret fear of
the telephone. Why call her when I could "Blitz" instead? But what
would I say? Would we talk about our new class? About our first-year
orientation activities? About high school, family, friends? O brave
new world, that has such people - and machines - in it! I fancied
myself a poet, a young writer. This would be my chance to show my new
friend my talent and, above all, my undying love for her. Having
never written an "electronic letter" before, I approached my work
with passion and enthusiasm.
To the accompaniment of the trombone solo on Frank's classic
version of "I've Got You Under My Skin," I began to compose my very
first piece of "Blitzmail." Lucky for you, dear reader, I have saved
this correspondence in my computer files. Names have been changed to
protect the innocent:
Dear Sarah,
Hi.
I paused. Then I froze.
We met at dinner...
No. That would be too obvious, too prosaic. I would try again -
perhaps I should try the vernacular to show her I was a man of the
world:
Sarah -
What's up?
No! Defeated again by my own arrogance! What sort of creature was
I that I dared to "Blitz" her? Words failed as a wave of shyness
swept over me and I stared at the dull blues and greys of my computer
screen.
After restarting my computer in a futile attempt to reboot my
imagination, I set to work again and this time wrote what amounted to
a three-page electronic dissertation. Included in this letter, which
I will not reprint here, were stories about my life as a high school
student at a small Catholic school in Waterbury, Connecticut; tales
of my family, including my sister, my Lithuanian grandmother, and my
two cats; details of my love for jazz and hardcore punk music; and a
little too much information on my comic book collection. Before I
could stop myself, I had clicked the "send" icon in the corner of the
Blitzmail panel, and my very first e-mail message had made its way
into cyberspace.
I anxiously awaited a reply.
Thus began a pattern which lasted for the balance of my four years
as an English major at Dartmouth College. I once held a three-hour
Blitzmail conversation in which a friend and I debated the merits of
Jack Kirby's artwork on early issues of The Incredible Hulk.
My friend and I never once left our rooms to speak to each other
face-to-face in the hallway. I talked with professors who were only a
few minutes' walk across the green. I kept a running diary of my life
in a series of e-mail messages intended only for me - and then mailed
each of those messages to myself once I was satisfied that I had told
myself exactly what needed to be said.
Perhaps my generation, those who are now in their late twenties
and early thirties, were uniquely prepared for this new form of
communication. Raised on a steady diet of Star Wars, Star
Trek, and other late 1970s/early 1980s space operas
(Battlestar Galactica, anyone?), we learned to love robots
like C-3PO and R2-D2 as though they were members of our immediate
families. As science fiction writer Harlan Ellison once said, the
most adorable and most "human" characters in the early Star
Wars films are those two 'droids, after all, the space-age Laurel
and Hardy. My generation had grown up without a fear of machines; we
had embraced the pale blinking images of video games like "Asteroids"
and "Pac-Man," the electro-pop of top-40 radio and MTV, the hum of
computer terminals and the warm green glow of pocket calculators. In
the process, however, had we also exchanged a piece of our humanity
for these tickets to the future?
To get back to the story at the heart of this essay, had I handed
the fate of my budding romance over to my computer? Had I tried to
bypass the toil and sweat of true human communication and interaction
for the press-button ease of the modern world?
Sadly, "Sarah" and I lost track of each other after graduation.
Although we had many long Blitzmail conversations over the course of
our four years in college, I ultimately found myself the victim of a
fate far older than the oldest Texas Instruments desktop dinosaur: I
became the victim of unrequited love. Not all the supercomputers in
the world, I wager, will ever find a solution to this dilemma. In my
worst moments, those times during our friendship when Sarah would ask
my advice concerning her new boyfriend, I looked not to my computer
for comfort, but to my Frank Sinatra records. I soon learned Frank
understood my heartbreak in a way the Banana Junior 2000 never
could.
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