Society goes online

Computerworld - A few weeks ago, a Pennsylvania software engineer named Christopher Love decided he had something to say to Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

So Love sent him an e-mail via the Iraqi news agency, and a few days later, Hussein apparently replied with a 10-page note of his own.

Welcome to the world since e-mail. It's state of mind, as much as it is a place, where war, geography, politics, social status and education are no longer enough to prevent two people with unfettered Internet access from communicating.

"We can't locate Saddam Hussein, but we can e-mail him," said Phillip Zimmermann, creator of the Pretty Good Privacy encryption code, which allows its users to communicate via e-mail without third parties being able to read any intercepted messages.

But, Zimmermann said, that's the way of the world with e-mail, a medium that has the immediacy of a phone call but that's much more powerful than telephones and most other kinds of communication.

E-mail has that power because it's an instant, asynchronous form of communication, according to Watts Humphrey, a fellow with the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. It's instant communication, but both parties don't need to be online at the same time for it to be effective, said Humphrey.

"For instance, I used to call people to arrange for meetings. Now I e-mail them to arrange for phone calls," said Humphrey, who set up IBM's first internal e-mail network in 1979. "I recently made two trips around the world and arranged the whole thing, both itineraries, with e-mail. You couldn't even do that with phones."

That ability to reach into the most remote parts of the world has made e-mail the choice of people in trouble to communicate with the outside world.

"You could be in some remote part of the world, and you could send an e-mail and it gets there," Zimmermann said. He related the story of a man in Germany whose father was trapped in Sarajevo in the midst of a siege during the Bosnian conflict. He said the man's father had only one hour of electricity per day and the father used that hour to communicate with the outside world via e-mail.

"E-mail has the ability to reach into and out of areas that are very difficult to reach through other means," Zimmermann said. "Especially if you are surrounded."

That ability to crush time and space could lead to a greater understanding between peoples, but it could also result in a backlash, said professor Brian Palmer, who teaches a course on globalization at Harvard University.