Black E-Business History
Home computers affect the way we preserve our rituals. Black Americans with home computers and one dial-tone phone service bump up against computer noise all the time when they pick up the phone to call and somebody else in the household grabbed the tone with their modem. Certainly this happens a lot at any given time, on any given day, with one of the 5.6 million Black Amerians that own home computers who attempt to make a telephone call. It's not surprising that computers mirror some of the rituals we all know. All it takes is a mouse-click, or the right infrared WebTV remote selection, or by pushing the right key on your keyboard and digital juices flow that can change your world. The Brittanica Encyclopedia salesperson knows this for sure. Used to be a time when all Black folks had a mother, father or relative that bought the entire encyclopedia set for the household, even if they had to do it on credit. Now, Brittanica has all but given up on selling their knowledge bibles to Black familes with the shelf space in their homes. Rather, you can get all you want from their Web site and it's more up to date and kept that way more often that the published version which was forcing the company out of businesses due to lack of sales of the printed text.
Computers are replacing some rituals we know of. Yes? And computers have added new ones to our lives like that habitually perky feeling you get when you turn on your computer and it tells you " You've Got Mail," but not from the Post Office.
Good thing first class mail still comes to the front door - a ritual made in heaven come rain, sleet or snow - the postoffice won't let you down. Since a substantial number of Black familes receive their social security checks this way, thank God for it. I hope this ritual never goes away. There is a reason why Black Americans have check cashing alternatives to banks in their communities. And some of the same reasons encourage Black Americans to send money orders rather than wire funds to destinations, or take checks to the banks to cash, rather than receive direct deposits from the payers. It's a ritual that runs deep. Trust is a part of that and most of you know what I'm talking about.
Rituals booted up by Microsoft Windows and the MacIntosh were not even available to Black Digerati Version I and II members as they were growing up before the year when the Internet entered our lives and interrupted it in the way it has today. When a 1,000 families were surveyed by PC Home Computing magazine in April of 1999, seventy-five percent said home computers brought positive experiences into life in the household and most likely the Internet is a big reason why. Older members of the Black Digerati that raised children and themselves before the Internet dropped from the heavens like a dense permanent fog, need not worry about what they may have missed by not having personal computers available to them in school or home. It's far to early to tell how soaked the rituals we are familiar with, will become in this new Digital Age /f gadgets that send and receive Electronic Mail and surf the web as easily as a washing machine washes clothes. There are indications of change.
In the chapter titled "Going Solo", we talk about how to get used to kids or friends, who lock themselves away in a room, away from family society, so they can computer surf without being disturbed. A person with responsible instincts would never limit future opportunities available to their children and computer using friends. Yet
instincts could fool you if yours are out of step with the culture of the Digital Age. You may force bad judgement upon a situation better handled by Electronic Mail during those moments when talking to them, a ritual that used to be the primary way to communicate, wasn't working.
I'm surprised that more than 50% of folks using home computers are sending family pictures around the wires. I didn't want to believe it at first, when I first looked at the survey results about this. But then I thought about Poloroid and the new products they recently brought out at the beginning of the year in hopes of resurrecting the company from it's profits slide. And all those Photo-Quick locations produce digital files from your stills. In hindsight, I shouldn't have been so surprised but I was thinking about this from grandpa's perspective. I can still see baby pictures taken of myself four decades ago. But, if all photos were digitized for sending across the Internet to distant relatives, or for passing up online to Web sites, what would you have to look at if your computer breaks? Computer standards are subject to change and photofile storage format standards will evolve. Nasa ran into a little problem with all that film it keeps on hand at the National Archives Center in Washington, D.C. PBS produced a documentary about the problem of digital file storage and emerging format changes. Seems that NASA got itself into a little bind storing all the data taken from previous space missions onto magnetic tape reels, because at some point, the tape drive manufacturers stopped making models that read the old formats now in storage. Today, NASA cannot read what it has in it's archives. Also, newer tape drives can't read them either and not one manufacturer has any big plans to make a machine that can. It's also unfortunate that magnetic tape disentegrates over time. It's turns to dust, rendering the data filed on these reels useless. Let us learn from this lesson to perserve the ritual of compatibility between grandpa, grandma and the family photo album. Family web sites are a good thing, but let us not toss the baby out into the digital bathwater. Grandparents tommorrow would rather not see our family photographs Brittanicalized.
For the purposes of this chapter, we've also examined the statistics of a popular Black American web site that had registered 35,000 members when the demographics were broken down for us. The oldest ritual in the world is the courtship of man and woman. Demographicaly speaking, the majority of members in the dataset were male, however compared to the millions of online users on this popular service, there was a higher percentage of females in the Black section than were present on average in more than a 1000 non-Black oriented areas surveyed. Love can be found in cyberspace. No doubt that computers once were considered "toys for the boys" but that has been rapidly changing year by year. Most attempts to feminize computer equipment for woman has failed to date as far as the equipment is concerned. Even one of the first software companies producing recreational software just for girls folder and was acquired by Mattel, which saved the company by matching the old product line up with Barbie and Ken, two products that were already doing well. Yet, when it comes to who makes a purchase decision over the Internet, females score big as being the most likely dominant force to influence the purchase decision. This is an obvious ritual computers hasn't done much to change.
Going online to a place where you can chat with anyone you want to in private or public areas is a big draw for both sexes. You don't have to use your real names and no one knows exactly where you live.
Black women who meet men online for the first time have married them in real life.
It cuts both ways. Men like being there too and they become rapidly bored if only there were men in the chat channels. The ritual of fostering "women's only clubs" or "mens only" clubs continues in cyberspace. The web site www.women.com is one of the busiest hubs for women online. There's also an African American Male Web site which features - you guessed it - just Black men.
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