In a best-seller, Cliff Stoll depicted the Internet as "devoid of warmth and human kindness." Methinks a book reviewer was right when he said Stoll could be trying to scare the newbies away to reduce congestion on the Net.
Alan Tidwell, senior lecturer in conflict resolution at the Graduate School of Management, Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia, read NetWorld! and says he is just as skeptical of Stoll's depiction as I am. The Net isn't better or worse than the world at large.
Although Tidwell runs Cyber.Consult, the preferred Net trainers for the Australian Computing Society, millions of other Netfolks would feel the same way.
With that, let me publish the Letter to the Writer below. You yourself can reach Tidwell at atidwell@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au. .
Yes, I'll welcome other notes from readers and may be reproducing the messages here when this is possible.
--David Rothman, author, NetWorld!, rothman@clark.net
I wanted to write and tell you a story which is directly relevant to points you raise in your book, and which contradicts Cliff Stoll.
My wife is 20 weeks pregnant. She's 36, as am I. She had a blood test to screen for Downs Syndrome. Her test came back with a high chance of us having a Downs baby. After waiting for three very long and tense weeks for the results of an amniocentesis we've discovered that the baby is fine.
Now, you may ask, "What does this have to do with the Net?" Well, a great deal. Our doctor is terrible. He has the bed side manner of Attila the Hun.
Needless to say we're changing doctors.
When my wife received the test results of the original screen from the Doctor, he simply said that she was 'high risk' without really elaborating on it much.
I was in Washington at the time, and not much help in any immediate sense. I cut short my trip to be with my wife. All along I was a little baffled by the lack of counseling offered by the Doctor. We both wanted know more about the screening test (called a triple screen).
We could find very few people here in Sydney to offer us counselling or information about what the test meant, its reliability, and so on.
Enter the Net. We used various search engines to gain information about the triple test. What we discovered was mind boggling. We discovered that lots of couples are given the results of their triple test with little or no explanation. Many couples suffer incredible stress, but are offered no support. The Internet connected us to a hospital in Oxford UK which provided considerable information about the test, along with many stories of people who had been poorly counseled.
We searched through many Usenet messages and discovered a whole underground of people who had been through what Jeanette and I had gone through. In sum, the net did a better job of offering support and counseling that our own doctor.
How could Stoll argue that the net is cold and impersonal? Sure, it's filled with jerks, but just like the rest of life it's got its saints as well.
David, I thought you might like to have this story as one more example of just how wrong Stoll is and just how great the Net can be.