CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

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Many Washington big shots, with expensive computers on their desks, have never visited the World Wide Web. ("My kids have promised to teach me this summer.") Ask for their E-mail address, and they sheepishly start patting their suits, as if for a lost pen, and finally say, "My secretary knows it, I think." To a denizen of the Other Beltway, this is like not knowing your own phone number. (And the tired Washington posture of "I'm such a busy big shot that my secretary runs my life" is also foreign to the Other Beltway, where the preferred macho posture is "I've got my whole life right here on a computer so tiny it fits up one of my nostrils.")

Snow used to prove his point by asking literary intellectuals to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They usually couldn't, even though, as Snow pointed out, to a scientist this would be like not having read a work of Shakespeare's.

The knowledge gap continues. At a Washington dinner party recently, out of deference to a visitor from cyberworld, the talk turned to computers. One guest made a brave foray: "What is this thing Pathfinder I keep hearing about?" Answer: Pathfinder is one of the most heavily trafficked sites on the Web. The company that owns this very magazine has spent untold millions building and promoting it. Time Warner executives will be disappointed to learn that none of these Beltway honchos could identify it. One person--an actual Time Warner employee--volunteered, "Oh, I know! It's just like Netscape!" Netscape Navigator is the leading browser software that allows your computer to use the Web. This would be like someone from the Other Beltway saying, "Newt Gingrich--isn't he a member of the President's Cabinet?"

Which is almost possible. I asked Sharam Sasson, 42, president and CEO of @Large Software, if he knew who Trent Lott is. Sasson, a highly educated, thoughtful and articulate research engineer, born in Iran but now an American citizen, said, "I don't know him." I also asked Joel Bellenson, the 32-year-old CEO of Pangea Systems, a 1991 biotech start-up. A few years and a few moves further along than @Large (though still, shall we say, preprofitable), Pangea is recently installed in a glamorous office overlooking a lake in downtown Oakland. Bellenson, who says he subscribes to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and listens to National Public Radio, said, "I presume he's a Southern political figure."

A happy and productive life does not require knowing that Trent Lott is the Senate majority leader. Not knowing may even help. But anyone inside the Washington Beltway could tell you who Trent Lott is, just as anyone inside the Other Beltway knows the difference between Pathfinder and Netscape. And each would be struck by the other's ignorance. The "incomprehension" between the Two Beltways, in Snow's term, does run in both directions.