"I don't think e-mail can replace regular mail," says Angela W. Pan '97, a Taiwanese student who uses e-mail to communicate with her parents in Taiwan and with her friends in the U.S., Europe, Hong Kong and Australia. "But [air] mail is more meaningful.

Pan says she misses the physical qualities of a letter when she reads a message on her computer.

"I think it's a feeling," Pan adds. "When you sit down and write, you put some part of yourself in it, like in the quality of the paper. There's the appeal of receiving a letter, [of] having something in your hand."

Other students say they are concerned about the privacy of electronically-transmitted messages.

"I think writing letters is a lot more personal," says Greek student Natasha Covas '96, who says she regularly e-mails her friends in England and Greece. "And it's a lot more private--people can get into your e-mail account if they have your password, and read your mail."

Iraklis Kourtidis '96, an Eliot House resident born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece, says a definite disadvantage of the Internet is that "too much information is available."

"You can see if a person has been where he or she shouldn't be," Kourtidis says.

Meeting Someone New

With a multinational pool of Internet users communicating in cyberspace, student say it is always possible to make a new friend.

In a textbook example of the "small world" phenomenon, Charles A. Peterson '96 discovered that a stranger who sent him a message over the Internet Relay Channel (IRC) shared a friend in common with him.

"I was on the computer one day waiting for one of my friends to log on," says Peterson, a dual citizen of the U.S. and Mexico who attended high school in Florida, but spent his summers in Mexico.

"I got beeped, so I checked my computer. Somebody I did not know started a conversation. He read my "who is" message, which was in Spanish, and decided to beep me."

Peterson says the stranger turned into a good friend, with who he talks regularly on the Internet.

"He turned out to be a friend of a friend of mine from Mexico. We reminisced abut Mexico and talked for well over two hours. There was so much to talk about--he was a Political Science concentrator at Georgetown, I'm a Government concentrator. It was cool, we got to be friends," Peterson says. "Now he's going to come up in a couple of weeks to visit me."

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