TO BE OR NOT TO BE...WHATEVER

(4 of 5)

Last year more than ever lesser Hamlets parked themselves behind personal computers. The previous year was the first in which the total amount of dollars spent on personal computers exceeded that spent on television sets; the total amount of E-mail exceeded that of surface mail; the total volume of traffic on telephone lines exceeded that of voice traffic. Last year's average PC had more computing power than the 1988 Cray computer. A Ford Taurus had more computing power than the lunar-landing module.

A national tendency toward individuality, independence or seclusion, depending on one's point of view, took hold in a widening variety of activities and businesses. (The trend was initially detected by such different observers as Harvard professor Robert Putnam, who called it bowling alone, and Faith Popcorn, who called it cocooning.) Book publishing was done at home, as well as graphic design, data analysis, all forms of consulting and repair services. The necessity of intermediaries was further removed in such areas as shopping, banking and real estate. Independent rock-'n'-roll record producers competed from their home offices with big-label corporations. People were encouraged to distance themselves from other people; the First National Bank in Chicago charged customers $3 for using a human teller rather than an automated one. In an unusual display of self-reliance, Chicago Bulls forward Dennis Rodman married himself.

Communities became virtual communities; living with one another meant living in touch with one another; the American impulse to create civic associations that so impressed Tocqueville as the central feature of democracy now made its home in cyberspace, which imposed a new class system on the old. Over the disintegrated boundaries of time and space, chess players found fellow chess players, militia groups new members, religions converts, husbands wives, teenagers sex.

In all this there were a few events of the year that touched people's better natures. Moments of silence occurred for Barbara Jordan, Cardinal Bernardin, Joseph Mitchell, James Rouse, George Burns, Claudette Colbert, Ella Fitzgerald and others of value whose deaths recalled what was valuable. At Ella's death the radio played the songs she graced, like Cole Porter's In the Still of the Night, and for a while a voice filled the air that hit every note on the note, sang words that meant something and infused heartbreak with joy.

The downing of TWA Flight 800 brought Americans monumental and collective grief, stopped the meaningless noise for a moment and reduced the isolation. On the beaches of Long Island, near where the plane plunged into the Atlantic, citizens from all backgrounds walked solemnly among the washed-up detritus of the crash--the serving trays, eyeglasses, baseball caps and sweaters--and would not swim in the sorrowful ocean.

Yet even that moment was soon overtaken by the hyped and sodden Summer Olympics in Atlanta, in which heroism and tragedy were defined by a small female gymnast with a twisted ankle.

In late November the New York Times reported the presence of "angst" among the city's important people because the closed-for-repairs Russian Tea Room, a restaurant designed to bring back the glory of the Czars, might never reopen.

"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,/ Seems to me all the uses of this world," says Hamlet to himself.