PUT YOUR PANTS ON, DEMONBOY

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See, I actually believed in the promise of cyberspace--that we could reach out over the barriers of age, race, geography and gender, and truly connect. No one would ever be lonely anymore. Writing would become a mass art form. Democracy would flourish as millions of people logged on to the vast, bubbling, uncensored online debate. I didn't know that much of what goes on online would turn out to be "utter drivel," as disillusioned cyberpioneer Clifford Stoll now concludes in his book Silicon Snake Oil, or "flame wars" of crude and escalating insults, or, of course, cybersex with Beavis and Butt-head.

Maybe the problem lies in the very anonymity that I had hoped would so liberate our spirits. A Swarthmore psychologist found in the '70s that if you put a group of total strangers together in the dark, they do things they wouldn't think of doing with the lights on--like grope. This is a result, apparently, of sexual repression. Put us in cyberspace wearing masks like "Demonboy," and an awful lot of us become gropers in the dark.

Maybe it was silly to expect that we'd turn on our modems and suddenly rediscover the joy of good talk. When is the last time you participated in or even overheard a thrillingly deep conversation? On TV, sitcom families have little to say beyond one-line put-downs, and the braying of pundits passes for political debate. In the movies, a few cliches and grunts, punctuated by gunshots, suffices for a two-hour screenplay. Maybe cybertechnology just came along too late, after we had already entered what postmodernists call the postword era. Which would mean that we have no more use for our supersophisticated communications technology than a chimpanzee has for a volume of Milton. If you can't eat it and you can't squish fleas with it, you might as well use it to masturbate with.

But could it really be that all the centuries of scientific discovery and technical ingenuity that led to the computer and modem were just laying the groundwork for someone to transmit messages like "Cockle Doodle DOOO" and "Can we undress?"?

Ah, Demonboy, it isn't your tongue I desire, but what is far more precious--a glimpse of your mind.