Email

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg comments on the popularity of e-mail. Noting that in this "age of banter" e-mail suits us well.

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg looks at how email technology is altering the way we write letters.

Tom Blanton is the editor of the book "White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages The Reagan/Bush White House tried to Destroy." It is published by New Press. Blanton is the executive editor of the National Security Archive, a freedom of information advocacy group. (Interview by Marty Moss-Coane)

Terry talks with New Yorker writer John Seabrook about the downside of electronic mail. Then she gets a response from Stewart Brand, the inventor of The Well, a computer conference system. . . Last January Seabrook wrote an article in the New Yorker magazine about Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates. Seabrook was flooded with electronic mail as a result, and to his surprise he was "flamed" for the first time. In Internet jargon, to be "flamed" is to receive an obscene or derogatory E-mail message. Seabrook said he'd never received anything like it before.

Language Commentator Geoffrey Nunberg will discuss the effects of Minitel, the computer distributed by the telephone system in France that has brought a word processor to every home with a phone.

Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review. He's written a book on the Media Lab, MIT's state-of-the-art computer lab.