| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : DECEMBER 13, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BUSINESS WEEK E.BIZ -- NET CULTURE
The Net Is a Family Affair More kin keep in touch by Web. Does the family that clicks together stick together? Ouida Warren knows all about the challenges of staying in touch. The Great Lakes (Ill.) counselor and mother of four used to spend about $400 a month phoning her naval engineer husband, Jemal, when he was away at sea. She wrote to him every other day, numbering each letter in order because he would receive a batch of mail only once a week. For years, she played videotapes of Jemal reading books for their children to watch before they went to bed. Then, last January, Warren discovered the Internet--and it has brought her and Jemal closer together. Instead of rushed phone calls or the occasional dashed-off note, he uses the computer to pour out his observations and his dreams in e-mail. Although Jemal's schedule and the ship's satellite signals don't allow daily communication, their interaction is rich. She has come to see a more reflective side of her husband. ''He tells me his whole soul through e-mail,'' she says. And that's just a snippet of the welcome changes the Net has brought to Warren. Today her family has scattered far and wide from her grandmother's home in Brookhaven, Miss. Staying in touch had become tougher, and less frequent--until the Web. Through e-mail and two family Web sites, Warren now chats with her cousins regularly or drops notes to her brother in Memphis. It has even transformed her relationship with her older sister, Nikki Pope, in Mountain View, Calif. The two went from being relative strangers to best friends. ''We e-mail each other several times a day,'' says Pope. ''I know what she's feeling. I know much more about her life.'' As midnight approaches on the millennium, a powerful force is starting to reshape family life. A century blamed for ripping families apart--spawning corporate nomads, divorce, and increasing social isolation--is giving way to one in which communication will be as easy as leaning over the backyard fence. With half of all U.S. households expected to be online by next year, according to market researcher Jupiter Communications Inc., the Internet is creating an electronic hearth--bringing far-flung families together: They can instantly, easily, and cheaply swap stories, exchange photos, pour their hearts out, even join clubs together. Who would have thought the Net would be more powerful than the century-old telephone for reaching out and touching someone? Conversations that were once limited to weddings or a Christmas phone call can now happen at the click of a computer key. Families can stage cyber-reunions and trace their ancestral roots. Even the handicapped can better connect with relatives they never had a chance to get to know before. There is a dark side, though. The boundaries between home and office are disappearing fast, allowing work to stretch well beyond the constraints of cubicles and 9-to-5 days. That liberates some people to work around the needs of their family but enslaves others to a workday that never seems to end--cutting family time short. ''As the Internet combines work with being at home, it's having a profound impact on families,'' says Judith S. Donath, an assistant professor of media arts and sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And if people living in the same house drift off into the isolated comfort of their computers, it will wind up making the often-criticized tableau of the family gathered in front of the boob tube seem intimate by comparison. For many, though, the Net is proving to be more balm than bane for families separated by geography. Peter Danford, a freelance multimedia consultant living in Shanghai, is a believer. When he first moved to Asia 11 years ago, he would chat with his parents in Cleveland through a rushed phone call once a month. Now he has a constant dialogue in cyberspace. Before a recent trip home for a visit, he says, ''my mother sent me a one sentence e-mail telling me to bring a suit because we were going out to a nice restaurant.'' No biggie. But without the Web to make communications a snap, he might have ended up underdressed. Some people discover that they open up more on the Net than they do in person. Judy Watson, a retired Barrie (Ont.) teacher, says she communicates more with her two children when they're working in Hong Kong than she did back when they were living in Canada. ''E-mail has made it easier for us to say, 'I love you.' And it's great to hear that on a daily basis,'' she says. Her son Glen Watson, a 32-year-old copywriter in Hong Kong, agrees with his mother. ''We share more information than we would if we were all still under the same roof,'' he says. That was true for Ouida Warren, the 34-year-old Navy wife, when it came to her relationship with her sister, Nikki Pope. They were eight years apart in age and barely knew each other when they were growing up in Chicago. But, thanks to 11 months of frequent e-mailing, they've now grown closer than they ever were before. ''I used to think my sister was Frankenstein's wife,'' laughs Warren. ''She's kind of mean and no-bull in person. If she says don't do this, you don't do it.'' Pope is surprised, too, to find her baby sister is so grown up. ''She'll hate me for saying this,'' says Pope, ''but Ouida is smarter than I thought she was.'' The Warrens are the poster family for Net togetherness. They've launched an online investment club on the Visto.com site, which lets people set up private Web pages for free. Warren chats regularly with 13 cousins, siblings, uncles, and aunts from across the country, each of whom is investing at least $100 a month to build a joint stock portfolio. There's also a family Web page, where everyone can post photos, news, and details about upcoming events. They recently used it to organize a 15-person trip to Los Cabos, Mexico, over Thanksgiving. The Internet can be just as helpful in bringing people with physical handicaps closer to their loved ones. Susie Kaiko, a deaf mother of two in Kettering, Md., has spent much of her life communicating with her sisters and parents through letters or occasional visits. Kaiko's deafness forced her to call family members through bulky teletype machines or a relay operator, who would pass her typed messages to other callers. That was expensive and took a long time. And ''it just didn't feel comfortable talking to them through a third person,'' says Kaiko, whose ability to travel has also diminished since she developed multiple sclerosis in 1984. Through the Net, Kaiko has learned a lot more about her own history--and about her relatives. As the only deaf child in a hearing family, she had missed out on many conversations while she was growing up. In cyberspace, her hearing is perfect. ''I learned more about my aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and grandparents than I ever knew before,'' she says. She can now offer more emotional support to other family members, including those who may be having a health problem or other crisis. ''I was pretty much in the dark on what was happening out there,'' she says. The Net makes it easier not only to get in touch with the family members you know but also to track down the ones you don't know. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has 400 million names on its FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service (www.familysearch.org). And U.S. Census Bureau information (www.census.gov) and other government data can be viewed online. In addition, sites such as Ancestry.com or Genealogy.com have each amassed a huge genealogy database to let people trace their family roots. Treva Jones of Lynn Haven, Fla., for instance, not only found a great grandfather when she was doing a search for her ancestors on Genealogy.com but also managed to track down several cousins in the process. Even people who share a home can benefit from hooking up in cyberspace. Darla Moran, a business management student in Dallas, began playing Internet games such as Meridian 59 with her son four years ago. The duo designed their own characters to eat, drink, and fight together in games they play from computers in separate rooms. ''The first time we saw each other in cyberspace, we just stood there squealing in excitement,'' she says. Two years later, their Net connections soothed the hurt after Moran separated from her husband. Her son, now 16, spends the weekdays with his father. But she makes sure he's home from school each day by logging on to the computer to see if he's waiting in Meridian 59. Since the separation, the Net games became a way to spend time with her son during the week and to reassure him that she was not abandoning him. ''At least we got to see each other in the fantasy world,'' says Moran. ''He would really look forward to those games and panic when I didn't log on.'' There are already hundreds of dot.com ventures and advertisers hoping to exploit all this high-tech togetherness. Sites such as Clubphoto.com and Photopoint.com help members create online photo albums for designated family or friends to share. TheGlobe.com, Tripod.com, and Mambo.com are among the many that let people build personal Web pages and chat groups or organize family events in cyberspace. Some, such as MyFamily.com, offer everything from creating family trees to seeking out lost relatives. And portals, including Yahoo! Inc. and Excite, recognize that families are a growing market. Privacy is essential to family gatherings on the Web. Until recently, most online bulletin boards and community sites were open to all comers. But, partly in recognition of the desire by families for private chats, many Web sites now offer password-protected areas. Sites such as Vzones.com have done one better. Vzones offers virtual worlds inhabited by avatars, animated characters that are controlled by participants. For $20 a year, people can opt for a premium membership that lets them ''rent'' and design virtual apartments at the site--including customized furnishings--for private conversations. They can hold parties and present virtual gifts for others to ''unwrap'' with the promise, perhaps, that the real thing is in the mail. ''Families target us because the experience is richer than just going on e-mail,'' says Vzones CEO David Andrews. Avatars or not, it turns out that some family get-togethers are simply better left to cyberspace. Jennifer Cohen, a design consultant at Forum Corp. in Toronto, has discovered that she likes some relatives more when they're online than when they're in front of her. She points to one relation whose nervous laugh and manner make her ''extremely irritating'' to be around. ''In e-mail, she's very personable and articulate,'' says Cohen. ''We've now become quite close.'' Purists may argue that nothing replaces the joy of real human contact, but they'll never know the pleasure of ''accidentally'' deleting crazy Uncle Eddie. By DIANE BRADY _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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