For the McNamara family of Hinsdale, life is full of digital firsts these days.
Parents Kevin, 45, and Julie, 41, recently began banking on-line. Daughters Maggie, 10, and Caitlin, 8, received their first electronic valentines earlier this month – colorful animated messages complete with sound that played over their computer speakers.
Not long ago, Kevin took the family’s regular film to Wolf Camera and requested digital photos he could send via e-mail; so much for ordinary snapshots in padded envelopes.
With all of these changes, the McNamaras say, something is gained and something is lost.
“When I was 17, I worked as a bank teller,” Julie said. “I knew the faces of people who came in. Now, nobody at our bank would know the faces.”
Such ambivalence about technology’s impact on daily life is reflected in a Stanford University study about Internet. The report, released last week to considerable media attention, warned that the Internet was poised to reshape American life, potentially alienating people from their families and communities. Co-author Norman H. Nie, a former University of Chicago professor, urged Americans to think about how technology is changing their interactions with others.
A visit to the McNamaras’ wired, west suburban household, however, illustrates the degree to which families like theirs already are thinking about it.
As with an increasing number of other American families, they have found their lives transformed in profound, irrevocable ways by information technology. They know it infiltrates nearly every area of their lives, from work to school to leisure, and that it affects the generations differently.
So even when they don’t talk about it, they know it’s always there: a steady hum in the background of their lives, a frequent glow from the second-floor room in which the family’s Dell computer does its work.
“It’s ubiquitous,” Kevin, a sales executive for a printing and publishing company, said of such technology.
Kevin and Julie grew up in a world already transformed, for better and worse, by technological milestones: telephones and television, automobiles and airplanes. These days, they look around at families assimilating an ever-changing array of the latest technology — tools and toys alike — and see both danger and opportunity.
They know, for starters, what they don’t want for their girls. They don’t want computer games to replace playing make-believe outside. They don’t want four people living separate lives under one roof, each retreating in the evenings into his or her television set or computer or portable stereo. They don’t want television — referred to derisively by many as “electronic wallpaper” — constantly playing in the background of family life.
“I hate it when you go into houses and the TV’s always on,” said Julie.
So when they built their house five years ago, a two-story white stucco home in prosperous Hinsdale, the McNamaras made some decisions about what goes where.
Though they could afford to equip each daughter’s bedroom with a computer and TV set, they did not. “A lot of people we know have computers in the kids’ rooms and people go into their rooms and are separate,” Kevin said. “We made a conscious decision not to do that.”
He and his wife also decided not to put a television or computer in the family room attached to their spacious, sunny kitchen.
Instead, they converted the large guest bedroom upstairs into an electronic headquarters for the family, with a computer, a TV and space enough for all four to congregate, oftentimes after dinner. That way, even if one person is working, another is on the computer and another is watching television, they are together.
Of course, the Internet is changing life in ways that can’t be cordoned off in a spare bedroom.
Just ask Alan Warms, chief executive officer of the Chicago-based company Participate.com, who argues that those changes will be coming even faster than anyone now realizes. “The Internet is going to change our lives much, much more than it already has. This will be an incredibly rich experience,” said Warms, whose company advises business on building on-line communities with customers and suppliers.
In the future, he said, homes such as the McNamaras’ will be equipped with broadband access, which speeds up Internet use, and video message boards, so that family members can send and receive missives with video and audio components.
“The Internet is an incredibly social opportunity,” he said. “Tomorrow, you’ll have Internet access in your car. What we’re seeing now is the tip of the iceberg in terms of how people use the Internet. It gives people freedom. And we still have a long way to go.”
Julie feels that her choices about technology already have brought her quite a distance.
A former business consultant who now is a full-time homemaker, Julie does most of her banking by cash machine. Recently, she started going on-line to transfer funds and do other transactions at Bank One.
Though she is sold on the convenience of not having to visit a bank for every task, she and her husband refinanced their mortgage at a smaller, local bank where they are greeted by name when they visit.
That’s one way of supporting local merchants, she said. Another is that when she shops for the dolls by designer Lee Middleton that her daughters collect, she buys them the old-fashioned way — at least up to now.
“I like visiting the local toy store. They know me. It’s kind of a tradition,” Julie said. “Especially in a community like Hinsdale, you want to support the downtown merchants because we want them to stay. But when it’s 20 percent off on-line, that’s a big difference.” The next doll she purchases, Julie said, probably will be off the Internet.
Those errands done on-line mean a little less contact with the community, but they also save time and money. Always, striking a balance is important to the McNamaras.
The family has signed up for an on-line grocery delivery service, another potential time-saver. So far, though, they still do most of their shopping at Dominick’s.
Julie predicts her daughters will grow up to do many more errands on-line, including grocery shopping. “It kind of makes me sad sometimes to think about it because if they shop on-line they won’t know the person at the check-out. They recognize me at Dominick’s.”
Transactions like that will further change a way of life that still revolves around home and community in large part, Julie said. “I call it `Mayberry RFDland,'” she said of her neighborhood.
She can see her daughters’ grade school from the family’s front steps, just beyond the yellow brick house flying an American flag. Her children walk to school and come home for lunch. On Sundays, the family goes to church together, then out for coffee, hot chocolate and bagels. Both girls take dance lessons and sometimes act in local theater.
What has changed already is that the girls now keep in touch with their theater friends by e-mail, the school has rows of bright-colored iMac terminals and, in Kevin’s case, looking at his calendar means peering at his Palm Pilot, part of his campaign to keep as little paper on the job as possible.
A family trip to the East Coast last summer started with the Internet. The family found directions that took them right to the front door of a country inn outside Syracuse. Before they left, they found such other useful details as the ferry schedule from Woods Hole, Mass., to Martha’s Vineyard simply by typing a few terms into an Internet search engine.
Those are the kinds of things that make the McNamaras enthusiastic about the Internet, despite their concerns.
“Anything that can make me more efficient, more productive, I’ll embrace it,” Kevin said.
He grew up in Boston, the son of a firefighter and homemaker. Sometimes, he and Julie say, they worry that children growing up in more affluent communities like theirs will come to see all the late-model computers and other conveniences they enjoy as entitlements, what everybody has when in fact many people do not.
But part of their job, the McNamaras said, is to prepare their daughters for the working world the two will enter after school. Though it’s impossible to know just what that world of 2012 and beyond will look like, they believe navigating masses of information on the Internet is sure to be key.
“The reason we’re trying to have our kids exposed to it, comfortable with it, knowledgeable about it ,” Kevin said, “is if you don’t understand it, it’s too much data.”
Like many families, the McNamaras use computers for a variety of tasks, but e-mail tops the list. Caitlin has been exchanging e-mail with a friend who recently returned to her native Australia after two years in the U.S., and Maggie likes to send instant messages to her friends.
When Maggie goes on-line, pals who have put her on a special list can see that she is on the Internet and fire off an e-mail. She fires back, responding with shorthand comments such as “lol,” an acronym for “laughing out loud.”
Maggie prefers the electronic conversations with friends to chatting with them on the phone. “I’m not into calling my friends unless it’s for a play date or something. They’re always busy. You can’t really talk.”
Julie is comfortable with e-mail, less fluent in its language and variations than her daughters, perhaps, but more adept than her own 59-year-old mother, who recently received computer pointers from Caitlin and Maggie.
Pat Walsh was a reluctant student at first but now is finding her way. As Kevin put it: “Grandma’s getting e-mail comfortable.”
For her part, Walsh, who also lives in the Chicago area, said she gets a kick out of e-mailing her grandchildren but worries sometimes that this wired society is getting too fast, connected more and more by modem and less by time together at home.
Indeed, e-mail may cut both ways, according to the Stanford study. “E-mail is a way of staying in touch, but you can’t share a coffee or a beer with somebody on e-mail or give them a hug,” Nie said.
For all the cool conveniences of technology, it has a downside as well, Nie and his colleagues cautioned. In a survey of 4,113 adults in 2,689 households, Nie said, he found that “the more hours people used the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings. This is an early trend that, as a society, we need to monitor carefully.”
The study found that the more years people have been using the Internet, the more hours per week they devote to Internet use. Some 25 percent of the people who are on-line more than five hours a week reported that it cuts into their time with family and friends; 25 percent of regular Internet users said they work longer at home than ever before, even when they have put in a full day at the office.
The Internet, Nie said, “could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than television did before it.”
But the McNamaras would tell you that they still have their neighborhood: It’s simply situated these days in a world that is flying headlong into an unknown place, prompting some apprehension, perhaps, but a great deal of exhilaration as well.
On a recent weeknight, a light glowed in one of the McNamaras’ second-floor windows. Julie was helping Caitlin finish a report on tennis great Althea Gibson. While Caitlin watched, Julie typed Gibson’s name into the Yahoo search engine. The computer flashed with 1,290 relevant Web sites. Together, mother and daughter figured out how to narrow their search.
Caitlin’s work had just begun.
THE MCNAMARAS
THE EQUIPMENT
-Computer: One Dell desktop, 56k modem speed, speakers, with AOL as Internet service provider.
-Televisions: Four (kitchen, basement rec room, upstairs computer room, master bedroom).
-Telephones: Six (kitchen, computer room, master bedroom; plus one portable at home and two cell phones).
THE PERSONNEL
Kevin, 45, sales executive
Uses e-mail, does e-trading, reads business news, researches travel, helps daughters with homework, buys books. Tracks appointments on Palm Pilot. Takes laptop on business trips.
Julie, 41, homemaker
Uses e-mail, researches health information, checks movie reviews, helps daughters with homework, has begun to shop on-line.
Maggie, 10, 5th-grader
Exchanges instant-message e-mail with friends, researches school reports with some supervision, plays educational computer games.
Caitlin, 8, 3rd-grader
Uses e-mail, plays flight simulator game, uses educational software, looks up doll-related Web sites, researches homework with supervision.
