INTIMATE STRANGERS

By Jill Smolowe

When she first joined ECHO, an East Coast electronic community, Marcia Bowe dubbed herself ``Miss Outer Buro 1991,'' a handle that facetiously implied beauty queen-like poise, glamour, congeniality. And soon enough, Bowe was enjoying the adulation of fellow ``ECHOids'' who posted messages praising her wit, candor and smarts. Such celebrity was heady stuff for Bowe, a free-lance writer who describes herself in real life as shy and wary of emotional encounters. ``I became addicted to this constant stream of approval,'' she says. ``It was like a big co-dependency machine.'' As Bowe began spending up to 100 hours a month online, however, her life began to take on the burdens of celebrity. ``Some people were envious of me,'' she says. ``They accused me of snobbery and elitism.'' More disturbing, Bowe began to realize that her own hyperactivity was masking an underlying unhappiness with her life. So she dropped out of ECHO, cold turkey. ``I had forgotten that the real world is so complex and fascinating.'' She's back in cyberspace now, this time in a paid position at ECHO overseeing its 54 conferences, but she has learned to navigate online with greater perspective and a thicker skin. That doesn't mean she's become detached, though. ``This is an emotional place, not just a communications device,'' she says. All of this may sound strangely overwrought to those who have yet to venture online. The Internet, after all, has been touted largely as an unwalled repository of raw data, not of raw emotions. But the truth is that the vast majority of people who troll the Internet's byways are there in search of social interaction, not just sterile information. An estimated 80% of all users are looking for contact and commonality, companionship and community -- all the conjugations implied by E.M. Forster's famous injunction ``Only connect!'' Relationships can be complicated in cyberspace because the very technology that draws most people together also keeps them apart. Over time, the safe sense of distance that initially seems so liberating to newcomers on the Net can become an obstacle to deepening the bonds of friendship, romance and community. At some point, most networkers often find, the only real way to move a relationship forward is to risk personal contact -- and then hope the phantom bond will hold up in the 3-D world. ``You can't lead a total life online,'' says Dave Hughes, founder of the Old Colorado City Electronic Cottage, a cybersettlement. ``But if it's done right, online communication can lead to face-to-face contact, not away from it.'' At its best, the sprawling Internet brings together people with mutual interests who, for reasons ranging from geography to social and income disparity, would otherwise never have met. These virtual friendships can lead to physical encounters that may cement lifelong relationships. ``The cybercommunity is not separate from your community of friends; it's just not geographically local,'' says Carolyn Ybarra, an anthropology Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. When Ybarra moved west from Minneapolis, her online quilting group threw an in-person farewell party. Since then, she has become good friends with two of her fellow quilters, keeping in constant touch online. ``I feel just as close to these women as I do to my college friends,'' she says. ``I tell them more up-to-date details of my personal life, more often, because their response is so quick.'' Ybarra was fortunate to encounter women who, in person, were much the same as they were online. That is often not the case. The disembodied voices that whisper through cyberspace can often be manufactured identities that can disguise, distort or amplify aspects of a user's personality. Fortunately, only a relative few -- Lotharios who woo indiscriminately, for example, or pederasts who prey on vulnerable children -- have a devious and potentially dangerous intent. Most Net users are more likely to project aspects of the person they wish they could be. Paulina Borsook, author of Love over the Wires, calls this ``selective lying by omission''; psychologist Kenneth Gergen, author of Saturated Self, more charitably regards it as ``playing out our other selves.''

Either way, even unintended distortions can prove bruising. When Christine Rance, 28, struck up a Net relationship with a man she knew as ``MyPalJoey,'' she says, ``I told him things I had never told anyone in my life. I was really able to be more open. He was too.'' After more than three months of furious messaging, the couple had their first F2F (face-to-face) encounter. About six months later, Rance secured a job transfer from Chicago to San Francisco, anticipating a trip to the altar. But after six weeks, the couple broke up, crushed by conflicting schedules and personalities. ``He's a very selfish person, more than I ever thought,'' says a chastened Rance. ``He didn't want to give up anything but wanted me to give up everything.'' Dan Marsh, by contrast, knew within five minutes of his first F2F with Audrey that their four years of online messaging between the West Coast and Pennsylvania had been time well invested. ``I don't react well to meeting people in person,'' says Marsh. ``I'm very reserved.'' But the relative safety of cyberspace had enabled him to be more trusting and vulnerable. ``Even though I'm the most private person you ever want to meet, I let my guard down right away,'' he says of their online courtship. In 1993, two years after meeting, the couple married. The problems of cementing relationships in cyberspace pale beside the challenges of forging whole enclaves. In fact, among the cyberintelligentsia, debate rages as to whether the concept of ``community'' even exists in cyberspace. Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community, says, ``I want to dispel the notion that a computer network is by itself a community -- a place where at least some of the people reach out through that screen and affect each other's lives.'' At some point, Rheingold says, ``it requires a further commitment either in real life or in cyberspace from those people to each other.'' Rheingold cites the death from cancer last August of Kathleen Johnston, a member of the WELL, a nine-year-old Bay Area settlement. Not only did many of the WELL's more than 10,000 subscribers flood Johnston in her waning days with electronic support, consolation and advice, but more than two dozen members took turns going to her home, tending to her needs. ``Not dying alone,'' says Rheingold, ``that's something a community has.'' Some found that the feeling of shared loss -- even if not shared directly with others -- was enough to forge a sense of community. WELL member Jon Carroll, who participated in the electronic support, believes ``cyberspace entered the real world in a real way with her death.'' In his view, virtual communities often enjoy a keener sense of connection than physical communities. ``Since they are in cyberspace voluntarily,'' says Carroll, ``people are far more interested in participating in the life of the community online.'' That view is not universal. ``We need to be critical of the use of the word community,'' counters Steven Jones, editor of CyberSociety, a new collection of essays on computer-mediated communications. ``If we use the term uncritically, we dilute it in ways that really count.'' To Jones, community implies not only responsibility, respect and acceptance of the consequences of one's actions but also simply ``being together,'' without any agenda. He regards the urge to form cybercommunities as a throwback to the '60s. ``We tune in, turn on, drop out, make our own rules, man,'' he says. ``This is not real.'' Denizens of virtual villages respond that what they have constructed is as real as anything three-dimensional. ``The online world is not utopia,'' says ECHO founder Stacy Horn. ``We take all our problems, needs, strangeness, biases and prejudices online with us.'' In short, members take themselves along for the ride. ``People who have troubles with their friends in the real world think they'll come online and have lots of friends, and it's not true,'' says Horn. ``They have equal trouble establishing friendships in cyberspace.'' In most online communities, the esprit is fiercely democratic. When crises arise, they are resolved by members thrashing out the dos and don'ts of cyberspace etiquette. Still, there are plenty of elites and hierarchies. Veteran settlers, who look askance at the hordes of newcomers, often form exclusive conferences where they can avoid endless beginner bellyaching about insiderish jokes and jargon. ``There are users and superusers,'' says Jones. ``There are E-mail addresses that have more status than others.'' In other words, the Net is pretty much more of the world we already know: a place both embracing and exclusionary, loving and hurtful. As happened with the telephone and automobile, technology lends to the fragmentation of people's lives and also helps stitch those fragments back together again. Most online veterans tend to agree that the challenge is to merge the connections made in cyberspace with real lives. ``We're not going to bridge anything simply by connecting,'' warns Jones. ``We can build all the bridges we want, but if we don't cross them and mill about, we won't make any kind of connections that count.''

--With reporting by Hannah Bloch, John F. Dickerson and Jeffery C. Rubin/New York and Julie Grace/Chicago

With reporting by HANNAH BLOCH, JOHN F. DICKERSON AND JEFFERY C. RUBIN/NEW YORK AND JULIE GRACE/CHICAGO