Mark Baldridge
Gender is
big enigma
in cyberspace
In cyberspace, no one can hear you sing.
Rich baritone or off-key soprano — no dif
ference.
The only voice you have comes out of the
tips of your fingers and takes the form of cheap
electrons on someone else’s CRT many miles
away.
Simply put, you can be anyone... of any sex.
Sign on to a chat forum in your jammies.
Pick a name, any name:
As janet.jackson, you can say hello to
BOGART, stop a while with lonelygirl or cast
longing *glances* at Big_Boy who says he re
members you from the party at Doug’s Chat
Server — or was it the “Volcano Room?”
Surf on over to the “Hot Tub” where BIGuns
is telling Leatherboy about “her” adventures.
Nevermind the fact that BIGuns is really one
Wallace Rodman of Long Island, an unem
ployed claims adjuster and closet crossdresser
of cvbersoace.
Log onto any reasonably friendly chat server
and a chorus of welcome rises to greet you:
“Hi, JunGirli Where are you from?” they
shout in chorus.
And some awkward guy calling himself
A.Trebek sidles over to you to *whisper* in your
ear, “Hey baby, wanna make it in the shadows
here?”
Stroke your stubble and think about it first.
These guys can be obnoxious, following you
from room to room like a lurker with intent to
loom.
Or, if your real name is Candi, you might
want to log on as Cyrano or Brutus. It makes
things easier if all you want to do is talk.
Of course, that’s all you will be doing, but
there’s talk and then there’s ... well, talk. You
know what I mean.
But for some people the urge to “talk dirty”
is just too great. Overpowering even.
“Hey, baby, I wanna frank your footsies.”
They can’t keep their fingers to themselves.
On any given evening there must be hundreds
of men in chat rooms dressed up in some fancy
girly name.
out people continue to ask.
I sign on as Ubik, most times. Meet an Ubik
out there and it’s probably me.
“So, Ubik, what kind of name is that? Are
you a girl?” I get asked this regularly.
What I always want to know is what pos
sible difference it could make. I’m not generally
looking to hear some guy describe his penis in
heroic terms, so why do they care if I’m a boy?
But they do.
“Any girls here tonight?” some guy called
RomeO wants to know.
We carry our genders with us all day and all
night and here’s some frood wanting to carry
the whole mess into cyberspace as well.
“YOU CAN’TTAKE ITWITH YOU” I want
to shout in large capital letters.
To some of us, the gender vacuum of
cyberspace offers a nice respite from the roles
and demands of gender. We don’t go around
sexualizing it unnecessarily.
Its a place where you can cut loose and swear
like a sailor, scratch yourself, vent your spleen
or just, like they used to say, “rap” with your
fellow cyberghosts.
It’s kind of like being dead.
Relaxing like that.
But then, in walks a cutie with a great set of
parentheses and — well, who can resist?
Internet acts as ’90s singles bar
By Jeff Randall
Senior Reporter "
The heydays of “The Dating Game” and
“Love Connection” are long gone, and the
Internet could be partly to blame.
Meeting people online has become one of
the Internet’s fastest growing and most popular
uses. Whether looking for love, friendship or
just someone to talk to, a number of college stu
dents have discovered the advantages and dis
advantages of online interpersonal relationships.
Carla Ott, an undeclared freshman, said
making friends through the computer was, for
the most part, easier than making friends in per
son.
“I’m pretty shy around people I don’t know,”
Ott said. “But when I can type what I want to
say to other people, I get more confidence.
“I can talk to almost anybody on the com
puter.”
The majority of electronic conversation takes
place in “chat rooms,” sites on the Internet where
people can type and send messages to a single
site for viewing by anyone who happens to be
logged on at the time.
For more private encounters, programs such
as the “talk” function in UNIX exist. This pro
gram allows two people to type messages to
each other in real time, the sender’s messages
appear on the receiver’s screen as they are typed.
These options and several more are utilized
by people in search of companionship across
the world.
“It’s amazing how many people are out there
who are looking for someone to talk to,” Ott
i .1
Bret Gottschall/DN
said. “They’ll talk to anybody, about anything.”
Brian Chandler, a sophomore English ma
jor at the University of Kansas, commented on
his more romantic Internet experiences through
the Iowa Student Computer Association’s Bul
letin Board System (ISCA BBS).
“I met this girl from Alaska on the computer,”
Chandler said. “We talked to each other all last
year; we were like high school kids.
“And as far as I knew, she could have been a
retired fisherman named Bob. I never actually
met her in person.”
The main mystery of electronic interaction
is caused by the fact that the people one meets
over the Internet are neither seen nor heard. For
some students like Chandler, that can be a prob
lem.
“I never know who I’m talking to, really,”
Eric Columbus, a freshman psychology major,
said. “I know I’ve lied about my identity once
in a while. My secret identity used to be Marsha,
just so I could see what it was like to have guys
hit on me.
“I didn’t like it.”
And that sentiment has been echoed by many
women who have had less-than-positive expe
riences in the Internet chat rooms.
“Harassment is a big problem,” Jennifer
Sands, a junior theater major, said. “There are
some pretty depraved guys out there with too
much free time on their hands.
“If they find out that you’re a single woman,
it can get to be a pretty ugly time.”
Sands said she combatted the harassment by
either using masculine identities or ignoring the
more persistent men.
“If you don’t respond, they usually get bored
of you after a while. There’s not much they can
do if you don’t pay attention to them.”
For those who have been able to overcome
the uncertainty, the confusion and the other
problems of online encounters, however, the
rewards have proven worth it.
Greg Anderson of Lincoln said he had been
able to coordinate a number of dates through
the Internet, and some of them had been worth
the trouble.
“It’s really the ultimate blind date,” Ander
son said. “You never see the other person until
the actual date, but you set it up for your
self.
“It’s a pretty good way to go, especially if
you don’t trust your friends to set you up with
dates.”
Computers changing music’s score
Patrick Hambrecht
Staff Reporter
With S200 and a computer, Lincoln musi
cians are building guerrilla sound studios ca
pable of creating the same industrial music as
featured on corporate-funded compact discs.
And for anyone with a computer, its easy to do
the same.
Jesse Bloom, UNL junior and guitarist for
the band lowercase i, said using a computer has
allowed his band to experiment with styles as
different as Japanese rhythms, orchestral string
sections and industrial samples.
“If I get frustrated with the way our music is
going, I can just type a single line of music into
the computer and then just go in a hundred dif
ferent ways,” Bloom said. “You have so many
instruments to choose from.”
However. Bloom’s roommate, a junior com
puter engineering major, isn’t content using
existing music software to create music. So Eric
Guthmann has written his own computer pro
grams.
“This way I can pretty much do whatever I
imagine,” Guthmann said. “I can change the
tempo, transpose or manipulate a song anyway
I want.”
Guthmann said the existing computer code
for music-writing software, MIDI, is archaic and
nearly impossible to understand for the aver
age musician.
MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital
Interface, and is the language that allows key
boards and computers to talk to one another.
But just because a Casio synthesizer and an IBM
PC can easily communicate using MIDI, doesn’t
mean people can.
To make it easier for PC composers to get in
on the conversation, Guthmann said he’s also
writing a new MIDI language that should be
easier for the average musician to use.
But MIDI computer language is only half of
PC music. MIDI is a language of musical theory,
containing everything needed to read a sheet of
music. But digital audio is the language of the
ear, able to hear a bird chirping, a motor run
ning — and turn that into music.
And this “sampling,” capturing a live sound
and turning it into a musical effect, is being used
by a lot of the newest types of music: rap, in
dustrial and ambient, among others.
And, of course, computers provide an easy
way to record the song with clear digital sound.
With a high-grade recording sound card,
there is virtually no difference between the
sound that goes into the microphone or wire and
out of the computer. And with a cheap or me
dium-priced sound card, a computer turns mu
sic into... industrial music.
Eric Medley is the resource manager at
Dietze Music House and an audio producer for
bands like Mercy Rule and Sideshow. He ex
plains the raw, computerized noise of industrial
music as the natural effect when using cheap
Sound Blaster quality sound cards.
“The more effects musicians pull with digi
tal recording, the worse it’s going to sound,”
Medley said. “But you can throw a musician
in a room with anything, and they’ll learn to
play music on it.”
To transform a home computer into an in
dustrial music studio, one only needs a sound
card, a microphone and an inexpensive
soundwave file program. All of these
things are usually included in a multime
dia package for around $100.
With the proper tools, it’s easy to make
groovy samples and repeat them in rhyth
mic intervals, as is done in hip-hop and
industrial music. Electronic effects
needed to make the formulaic “techno” '
sounds are usually included with soft- _
ware program.
For simple re-_
cording
purposes,
even a
cheap
sound card onpn captures music better than a tape
recorder or tapadeck. A quality sound card, like
the Roland Rap-l^^vill cost at least $300 and is
necessary for any sophisticated recording.
Of course, once aw
recording is made, it f
has to be reproduced *
somehow: either on
tape, CD, DAT or per
haps purple translu
cent collector’s vinyl 1
— and all for a lot *
more money.
" ’ V u
James Mehsling/DN