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| Worked Up About Wireless | |||||||
| Our columnist lugs his laptop to the park to test the wonders of a wireless Internet and finds it may be more work than worth it | |||||||
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| Aug. 19 — I received an email the other day from a writer friend of mine asking me to stop sending him emails. Apparently, he is so busy working on his next project—a multiple-page document that is commonly referred to as a “book”—that he wouldn’t have time to read them. |
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| I SUPPOSE I SHOULD have been flattered—after all, he was indirectly telling me that my emails are so compelling that they distract professional writers from money-making projects. But I wasn’t. I’d been demailed. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Just as I was absorbing this massive snub, a press release came across my desk telling me that the city’s oldest park had just been set up to provide free wireless Internet access so that visitors can “use the newest available technology to surf the Internet wirelessly from laptops and PDAs while lunching or relaxing.” You can imagine my skepticism; a professional writer had just told me that he was going off-the-grid and here was the Downtown Alliance telling me how great it would be to sit in Manhattan’s Bowling Green and still be able to read your email. For a spiteful, small-minded person like me, there was clearly only one thing to do: go to Bowling Green and send an email to the writer who demailed me and, in doing so, hopefully learn a valuable lesson about who we are and where we’re going. Are we going to return to our pre-email past, when happiness meant getting a real letter in real handwriting delivered by a real person in unflattering short pants? Or are we going to embrace this new, wireless technology so we can be connected all the time and always be working? I needed to go to Bowling Green to find out. The first thing that happened, of course, was a pigeon pooped on me. No, seriously. I sat down on one of the park benches and while I was waiting for my Windows XP to warm up, a pigeon relieved himself on me (he may have been targeting me for 45 minutes, which is roughly the time it takes Windows XP to warm up). I considered the now-famous Pigeon Incident to be the first vote against taking technology outdoors. The second was this burning sensation in my loins. No, it wasn’t all the girls walking by dressed in their summer clothes (as the Rolling Stones once put it), but simply all the close contact between my thighs and the underside of my laptop. (Hey, if they’re going to call them “laptops,” shouldn’t some Einstein figure out how to prevent them from reaching 1,500 degrees?) Finally, I inserted an 802.11B wireless local area network card into my computer and prepared to enter the brave new world of outdoor wireless computing. And then ... nothing happened. Apparently, my computer—which is less than a year old and cost the equivalent of a WorldCom write-off—is not sufficiently geeky enough to access something called the “dynamic host configuration protocol” (and after all that money I wasted on etiquette lessons!). For whatever reason, the 802.11B (which sounds more like a health care workers’ union than a piece of computer hardware) and my computer were incompatible. “Machines should be shot,” said Rich Taylor-Worth, the techie from the Downtown Alliance who was helping me. “The only solution is to throw this machine in the Hudson River.” When I restarted my computer, I received an error message from Microsoft explaining that “the system has recovered from a serious error.” I would have been reassured, except that I received the very same message repeatedly over the next two weeks, indicating that my “system” recovers about as well as Robert Downey, Jr. Is this really the future of telecommunications? It’s not even the present. While Taylor-Worth was calculating the trajectory required to get my laptop into the Hudson on one toss, I looked around the historic Bowling Green for evidence that people were craving this new service. All around me, people were playing chess, reading, talking to friends, pickpocketing tourists, eating, or listening to a free concert by a jazz band—you know, everything you’re supposed to be doing in a park. No one was online. |
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Later in the week, the founder of NYCwireless, which is a company dedicated to the proposition that all networks should be created cordlessly, finally got my computer to work and I was online in the famous Bowling Green. I finally sent that email to the anti-email writer who spurned my overtures of friendship. While I was waiting for his reply, I downloaded my own email for the day. And thank goodness I was online! The very first email in my inbox was from “Dr. Ben Tata,” who identified himself as “A CHIEF ACCOUNTANT WITH ECOWAS CONTRACT AWARD COMMITTEE HERE IN GHANA.” Spelling mistakes aside, Tata laid out what seemed to be a fantastic deal for me: “WE HAVE $37.5 MILLION USD STILL OUTSTANDING AND WE INTEND TO TRANSFER THIS MONEY INTO A NEUTRAL ACCOUNT WHOSE OWNER WILL PROTECT OUR INTEREST...WE HAVE DECIDED TO SEEK YOUR ACTIVE COLLABRATION [sic] AND ASSISTANCE IN EXCUTING [sic] THIS TRANSCATION [sic], AND THE TERMS ARE AS FOLLOWS: 60% TO THE OFFICIALS CONCERNED, 30% TO YOU THE ACCOUNT OWNER WHILE 10% IS TO TAKE CARE OF ALL LOCAL AND INTERNATIONAL EXPENSES. IF YOU AGREE, ALL YOU NEED TO DO IS SEND DOWN THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION: YOUR BANK NAME/ ADDRESS/ACCOUNT NUMBER, AND TEL/FAX NO OF THE BANK WHERE THIS FUND WILL BE TRANSFER [sic] INTO.” Hey, I may have just started wireless networking, but this guy Tata was making a hell of an offer. Imagine, if I’d been off-line, I might have missed it. While waiting for the journalist to email me back, I thought of calling David Shenk, who wrote a book a couple of years ago called “Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut,” to see if being able to surf the web or send email while sitting in a park was a good thing or a bad thing. But I stopped myself after realizing that calling Shenk to find out about data smog would actually itself be a form of data smog. Then I remembered that I was linked via a wireless connection. I could sit in a park on a beautiful day and waste my friend’s time to find out whether sitting in a park linked to a wireless network was, in fact, a waste of time. Shenk’s answer? Yes. (But not in so few words, unfortunately.) “Without a doubt, the increasing speed and portability of information can make life easier, more convenient, and even richer. It can free people up from being bound to one (drab) physical location,” he emailed. “The danger is in the thrill, the titillation of it. The flicker of electronic stimulus can be overpoweringly seductive. Are people going to sometimes let their attention be captured by some meaningless-but-thrilling electronic bleeping and blipping—where it could have been directed on more meaningful thought or conversation or aesthetic appreciation? I think that’s the danger.” I re-directed Shenk’s brilliance onto Anthony Townsend, the founder of NYCwireless and he ducked the question like Bill Gates ducking a subpoena. “Giving workers more flexibility is a good thing,” he said. “Why should you have to go into an office if you can receive and send emails or get phone calls wherever you are?” |
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“That is our nightmare scenario, I admit,” Townsend said. “The last thing we want to see is the entire park filled with people just typing and not interacting.” It hasn’t happened yet, fortunately. And it may never. After all, the big-time writer never got back to me, so maybe there’s hope for those who want to stay disconnected. Either that, or he’s too busy counting Dr. Ben Tata’s money. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post and a sportswriter for The Brooklyn Papers. His Web site is at http://www.gersh.tv © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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