"When you have a hammer, everything starts tolook like a nail," adds Steven W. Wardell '94-'95,who says he saves $15 a month on his phone bill bysending e-mail to his girlfriend in Texas. "Whenyou have e-mail, you start using it for everythingyou can."

Insecurity

Policing Harvard's student center has not beeneasy.

The College has so far struggled to regulateethics on the electronic frontier. And theAdministrative Board, Harvard's disciplinary body,is beginning to see cases for which there are noprecedents.

Last spring, for example, Kelly K.Johnson-Arbor '96 received an electronic mailmessage supposedly from her friend Grace S. Lin'96.

"Kelly, I know this is crazy," the messageread, "but I'm actually bisexual. I haven't toldanyone, but I think cunnilingus soundsgreat-Grace."

The message, however, was a fake missive sentnot from Lin but by Eric E. Blom '96 a student inQuincy House. Blom later apologized to the twowomen, and they did not take the matter to Collegeauthorities.

Still, in the same way that many undergraduatesremain concerned about crime on campus, studentssay they worry about security breaches on thenetwork.

"The system is too easy to beat," says WhitneyD. Pidot '96, a frequent network user andpresident of the Salient, a conservativemagazine. "And the ultimate enforcers, the Collegeadministrators, don't know what's going on [or]how to divvy out the penalties."

Regulating the network is difficult becauseit's fundamentally different from more traditionalmediums of communication. Users say they feel morecomfortable speaking their mind in cyberspace,freed from the constraints of face-to-faceinteraction.

The 'net effect has been to alter fundamentallythe nature of communication at Harvard.

"People are more free to say things theywouldn't otherwise say," says Samuel A. Hilton'94. "It lets you speak your mind."

But there are early signs that the nature ofdiscourse over the network is turning some peopleaway from it.

The network, for example, may not be asattractive to women as men. During one randomsurvey in April of all posts to the Widely readnewsgroup "harvard.general," an electronicbulletin board, only three of 98 messages were putthere by women.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science MargoI. Seltzer '83 says this discrepancy may resultfrom a cultural bias against women in Science morethan the nature of communication on the network."This problem starts much sooner than high schooland college," she says.