COMMITMENTS : Virtual Friendship : Ah, E-Mail . . . With Its Postcard Immediacy, That Little Technological Marvel Can Overcome the Strains of Time and Distance in a Way No Telephone Call or Letter Ever Could

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the electronic age.

Back in college, I used to scoff at the early generation of personal computers, proudly choosing to write my papers on a portable Smith-Corona instead. When I finally did buy my first PC, the model I chose was hardly more than a glorified typewriter, equipped with two floppy disk drives and little else--not even a mouse. It was 1991 before I got a computer with a hard drive, and 4 1/2 years later, I’m still using it, although the antiquated microprocessor makes even the most mundane applications painfully slow.

Part of the reason for my technological skepticism, I’m convinced, is that it’s hard enough to maintain relationships with the people in my life, let alone get involved with a machine. Like most folks, I am, at times, spread so thin you can see right through me; between work and raising a family, I’m lucky if I get to see my friends once or twice a month. Besides, the very idea of cyberspace tends to give me the willies, as does anything I know is there but cannot see. Our current cultural obsession with it reminds me of a science fiction story I once read, where the characters ingest hallucinogenic “happy pills” because the real life they would otherwise confront is simply too horrible to bear.

For all my doubts about the computer revolution, however, there is one corner of cyberspace to which I’ve taken like a virtual duck to virtual water, and that’s the wonderful world of e-mail.

These days, I spend several hours a week in that alternate universe, doing what used to be known as talking with friends. I know a woman who believes that there’s no more comforting sound than the voice of America Online intoning, “You’ve got mail!” While I wouldn’t go quite that far, I understand what she means. E-mail, after all, may be the only part of the cyber puzzle that does what its adherents claim for it: using technology to bring us closer together rather than driving us further apart.

Six months ago, I would have never believed that, would have derided such sentiments as Utopian or naive. Six months ago, the word e-mail would have conjured an image of millions of isolated people, sitting alone before their computer screens.

What kind of community, I would have asked, can you find within the circuits of a machine? What kind of community has no face and no name? At best, e-mail seemed like just another distraction, one more illusion behind which we might hide.

Then, during a visit to New York in September, I had dinner with an old friend. Partway through the meal she turned to me and said, “You know, we don’t talk except when you’re in town.”

She was right, of course, and I began to catalog a litany of excuses: the time difference, my responsibilities as a parent, the way there never seems to be a single spare minute in the day. But before I could finish, my friend interrupted.

“Have you ever considered e-mail?” she asked. E-mail, she went on to explain, had turned out to be an unlikely instrument of connection--the glue that held her family together, in fact. Far-flung by both geography and temperament, they had, for years, been slowly slipping apart. Phone calls grew less frequent; family get-togethers were sparse.

“But now,” she told me, “we send each other little notes. ‘Hi, how are you, just wanted to see how things are.’ I’m more in touch with my sisters than I have been in years.” Even her eightysomething mother had become a devotee.

My friend’s comments started me thinking, and back in Los Angeles I decided--hesitantly, anxiously--to go online.

Although I initially remained skeptical, very quickly something unexpected happened: I started writing letters again. Looking through an old notebook, I dug up the e-mail address my friend Steve had given me the last time I’d visited him in Boston. Once, Steve and I had spoken every day, but time and distance had conspired to push us apart, and at least six months had passed since we’d last talked. I typed out a chatty letter, telling him about my son and the work I’d been doing, inquiring after his wife and himself. The next day, I received a response, and now we communicate several times a week, sharing everything from jokes and family gossip to our opinions of the “new” Beatles’ song, “Free as a Bird.”

With another friend, Kit, e-mail has become a virtual lifeline, a way of making sure he’s healthy and safe. That’s because, over the summer, Kit left Los Angeles for Sarajevo to report on the civil war there.

Getting an address or phone number for him proved next to impossible, but e-mail information was easier to find. So periodically, I send him a message wondering how he’s holding up--a subtle way of asking, “Are you still alive?”

When Kit writes back, he generally complains about the food or his computer problems, and reassures me that his biggest health risk is smoking too much. Paradoxically, these little details, so incremental and routine, make me feel especially connected, as if they have come up in conversation under anything but the extraordinary circumstances through which we are trying to remain in touch.

In that regard, e-mail may be uniquely equipped to bring people together, for the postcard immediacy of it seems to foster just this kind of small, intimate moment, the kind that often gets lost in the disassociation of the phone. My friend James explains it this way: “Calling someone is such a big deal, whereas e-mail is a more casual thing. It seems strange to say, but it’s like they’re there with you, only in delayed time.”

James, too, has found e-mail invaluable in resuscitating distant or moribund relationships.

“If it weren’t for e-mail,” he admits, “I wouldn’t even know my brother. We used to communicate about once a year, but now it’s more like once a week.”

To be fair, part of e-mail’s appeal probably has to do with the novelty, with the fact that technology can make correspondence seem like a game. Ten years ago, when I bought my first computer, I suddenly found myself writing a lot more letters because it was such a new (and fascinating) experience to watch the ribbon of my words scroll across the screen.

Similarly, there’s a certain cheap thrill involved in jotting down anything that pops into my head and, instantaneously, sending it halfway across the globe. No matter what time of day or night, I can always reach out and touch someone--without having to walk down to the mailbox on the corner or run the risk of waking anybody up.

Yet underlying all this, I think, is our inherent drive to be connected, something technology cannot dispel. Even in these fast-paced times, when history unfolds at the speed of television and computers interact at a pace that boggles comprehension, we are still social animals who need the touch of another (whether real or metaphorical) to feel at home in the world.

Given that necessity, e-mail is just the latest evidence of how we adapt to our surroundings, a quintessential modern phenomenon that combines immediacy and commitment in a peculiarly human way.

Or, as James puts it, “I like to look at the online world as a big virtual refrigerator. And what you’re doing with e-mail is leaving virtual Post-It notes for your friends.”

There’s a certain cheap thrill involved in jotting down anything that pops into my head and, instantaneously, sending it halfway across the globe. No matter what time of day or night, I can always reach out and touch someone. . . .