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Unit twenty-five Electronic Mail Friends and family disperse like dry leaves, drifting to different cities and countries. Ill write, I promise solemnly. Alas, my good intentions produce only imagined letters never embraced by paper, never kissed by stamps. Ah, but electronic mail has changed my ways. My Computer has become an epistolary Pinatubo, erupting With letters and missives and memos whizzed around The world at the velocity of light. I share thoughts with Pen pals in New Zealand, query strangers in Bombay, Debate magicians in Manhattan. Never having tried it, I used to scorn E-mail as Boring high tech, the stuff of business telecommunications. Then a friend insisted I investigate this invisible world, as he called it , claiming that it is expanding exponentially. I logged on to CompuServe, a national on-line information Service, and was hooked. E-mail is a pipeline to thousands of experts on virtually everything; it is a means of meeting people with similar interests or problems. What its not is live chatreal-time conversations like those on ham radio or CB. E-mailers compose letters at leisure on their computer, Then send them through the phone line to an on-line service or a computer bulletin board. E-mail addresseseither names or on-line service account numbersautomatically forward mail to the right place. The vast networks of no-line services and bulletin boards bubble with pools of people-to-people information a key-stroke away. Besides uncounted millions of members of various on-line services, some 11 million people regularly log on to as many 45,000 public bulletin boards in the United States. And they tend to be extraordinarily generous about sharing their thoughts and ideasperhaps because there is no pressure to respond and no face-to-face confrontation. | 
