Subject: FetterNet
From: <Saved by Windows Internet Explorer 7>
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 09:14:59 -0200

Thanksgiving in Cyberspace:
A Far-Flung, Close-Knit Family's
Computer Network

by Joel Garreau
(Washington Post Staff Writer)
The Washington
Post
Thursday, November 25, 1993

[Uploaded with permission.]

Six times Kathleen Burns Freeman packed off for Fairfax Hospital
with contractions. Six times, she quickly zapped a computer note to her clan:
"We're going to the hospital; this time, this is it."

"Then we'd get home," she recalled, and five times she'd have to get back on
the computer and message everybody: "Well, not this time."

In simpler times, this might have been a small family drama. But in the
digital age, Freeman's false alarms reverberated around the world. For from Sao
Paulo, Brazil, to Berkeley, Calif., to Corpus Christi, Tex., to South Bend,
Ind., to Springfield, Va., Freeman's family is simultaneously linked by
Fetternet -- a computer network completely devoted to keeping her huge
extended family close despite a broad diaspora. Freeman not only had her parents
and brother biting their nails. Some 50 or so uncles, aunts and cousins --
including one cloistered nun -- were also driven crazy. "I got home one day and
had a message from my uncle in Brazil that just said, '???????,'" Freeman
laughed.

When her son, Daniel, finally did arrive and Kathleen returned to the network
named after her grandmother, Gertrude Fetter Burns, the Fetternet was
abuzz -- she had 42 messages waiting. In addition to warm congratulations, many
messages welcomed "the first Fetternet baby."

The Fetternet will be humming again this Thanksgiving Day, the family is
sure. Across the Americas and now to Dublin, Ireland, where a cousin is
studying, relatives will make their computers a central part of the festivities,
comparing dinner menus cooked from old family recipes traded on the Fetternet,
teasing about football rivalries, and remembering family times in Columbus,
Ohio, during the Depression. A fond network topic on Thanksgivings past was
memorable turkeys. "The ones Dad used to get were huge, 25 or 30 pounds,"
Camilla Burns of Chicago recalls. "I was his sidekick. We used to go to
Macaluso's, an Italian vegetable and fresh fruit warehouse. For Thanksgiving,
Dad would get a hundred pounds of potatoes, a whole crate of oranges, a crate of
grapefruits. One of our famous Thanksgiving stories is about how Mother always
cooked fresh cranberries. My sister, Laureen, once looked into the pot, saw all
the whole shells and took the whole thing out to the garbage can."

As people increasingly interact via ethereal computer connections, not only
are industries transformed, but so are human relationships.

Electrons may be thicker than blood; computer ties more intricate than
memory. "Virtual's stronger than real," insisted John Burns, Kathleen's uncle in
Brazil, who helped found the family net two years ago.

If someone in the community were to die, it would take a long time for me to
get over it" because of the family computer network, he said ruefully.

"You'd miss them every day. In every topic that came up" you'd be aware of
their absence, his sister-in-law, Pat Burns, of Springfield, agreed.

Although the number of connections being made to that backbone of cyberspace,
the Internet, is doubling on an almost annual basis, no one even knows how many
millions of people are actually traversing it daily, much less keeps track of
how many families like the Burnses are linking up there. Howard Rheingold,
author of "The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier,"
notes that as more and more college students get access to the Internet free at
their schools, they are being joined in that realm by their parents, although no
authority knows or wishes to know who is communicating with whom, much less
collects statistics on the subject. Electronic inquiries posted by The
Washington Post on computer bulletin boards around the country, however,
anecdotally confirmed that the pattern is on the increase: Generations separated
by distance are increasingly meeting in cyberspace.

When some 20 members of the Burns family gathered for a reunion recently at
the Springfield home of James Burns, a consultant for the Drug Enforcement
Agency, they talked about how their network had changed their lives. Another
several dozen responded to questions typed onto the network from the upstairs
computer on which the bluepoint Siamese cat, "2," likes to curl.

One of the great advantages, they agreed, is that "it's immediate, it's
intimate, and it's nonintrusive," as John Burns put it. This medium is both
cheaper -- about $8 a month for unlimited messages -- and more casual than a
phone call. People get on and talk about the weather, and about the little
happenings in their day. "I nailed a roof of the new room for most of the day,
until I got rained off," Francis Burns wrote from Junction City, Ohio. It's the
kind of chit chat that might occur around the kitchen table, but not the kind
that is so compelling as to justify a long-distance telephone call.

The network is routed to and from each family's computer through CompuServe,
the giant information service based in Columbus, Ohio. There are many ways to
make this connection, including other networks such as the Internet. But the
most common method is to call a local number to get an ordinary telephone line
that shoots messages to CompuServe and then out to the family. Individuals write
messages in the fashion of E-mail. Then they go to an address-book CompuServe
screen that displays for them all the members of their family on the network,
and their electronic addresses. The writer can then click on any individual, or
any combination of members, to receive any given message. Or, they can broadcast
to everyone on the network. The messages pile up in a fashion that looks like
the script of a play.

The net binds the group together in ways that family reunions never do. It's
hard to have a one-on-one conversations with somebody if there's 20 people in
the room that you haven't seen in a while," Kathleen said. "So you're trying to
kind of talk to everybody."

...

Liliana, John's Brazilian-born wife, added that she found very revealing the
feelings of pride that her husband had toward his father, which she never knew
about until she read his postings.

There is a distinct feel to the Fetternet, its participants say, and it is
not alien or cold. There is a "thereness" to the experience that to James Burns
is comparable to when the 10 children in his family were growing up in Columbus
during the Depression.

"The feeling I had was that John was in the next room and Francis was
downstairs," he said.

"At the same time the physical distance between family members is actually a
plus," he noted to raucous agreement from his relatives.

"All my brothers and sisters could do things which would irritate the hell
out of me," John Burns said. Calling him by an old nickname, "Poppadink," for
example. In the past when he visited from Brazil, "face to face was very
stressful and very superficial. We weren't having discussions, we were having
shouting matches."

By interacting more deeply and more frequently on the net, however, John
said, "I've gotten to know these people and their qualities, and our
eccentricities, not to say neuroses, and to accept them for that." The result?
More tolerance than before.

And more closeness. "When he used to live in Alexandria, he was remote," said
James of John. But now he's in Brazil, but he's here all the time. On the
machine."

Contributing to the smoother relations is the time one can take in making a
response on the net, Liliana noted. "You don't have to answer immediately. So
you have time to settle down, and then react." Another advantage, noted
Chicago-based Camilla, a sister of Notre Dame who is a professor at Loyola
University, is that when your family starts to irritate you on a computer, you
can turn it off.

The wonder of electronic communications, "allows us to get back what was lost
in terms of an extended family -- the diversity, the wisdom of years from older
members, the cross-pollination, the fresh air," posted Robert Tyree from White
Sands, N. M. Although, John added, "it's an open question whether the extended
family ever really provided this kind of communication."

For all the depth the Fetternet has added to family relationships, Pat said,
"I'm not sure that this kind of a network would work without a real level of
friendship and understanding before you started."

But work it does. "I say I have my whole family in my bedroom," said Liliana,
of the place where the family computer resides. "Just push the button and they
are right there. I really feel that."

Vice
President Al Gore's comments on the FetterNet

| Home Page
|