Tuesday, February 15, 2000

Drudgery report: TV shows document 'E-caving' craze

After watching the second "Good Morning America" experiment in "E-Caving" last week, I have to ask: What's so tough about that?
   Here was the deal: Three young people - Tosha, Terra and Gonzalo - were locked into nice, but empty, apartments for a week with nothing but one set of clothes and an Internet-connected computer. On a budget of $500 per day, they had to make do, ordering whatever they needed, from ice cream to bed sheets to scuba lessons (!) from the World Wide Web.
   Dependent on technology, Tosha and Terra in New York and Gonzalo in Houston lived in what "GMA" anchor Diane Sawyer breathily referred to as "a futuristic cyberworld of their own making . . . the E-Cave."
   The premise, according to "GMA," seemed to be that it was a glimpse into a future in which we'll all be forced to bunker down in some kind of urban solitary confinement, with nothing but a TV, a computer and pizza delivery boys to connect us to the outside world.
   Hey, welcome to the life of a TV critic.
   The "GMA" E-Cave set-up looked pretty sweet to me. Rent-free digs. A whizbang computer. And nothing to do but figure out how to spend $500 a day.
   Where do I sign?
   Tosha, Terra and Gonzalo certainly had no problems dispersing their generous stipends. Among the items these spree-lunkers purchased online (and had delivered to their doors) were: an $850 TV, wine, gourmet groceries, gardening supplies, clothes from Eddiebauer.com, books and CDs from Amazon.com, towels from Bloomingdales.com, virtual scuba lessons and a mariachi band for a party.
   Join the crowd
   As a ratings stunt, this E-Caving thing is catching on. A TV reporter in Cleveland, Ohio, and an entertainment reporter in Sacramento, Calif., are both being voluntary agoraphobes for their stations during February sweeps. The reporters have camera crews recording their "futuristic" efforts at achieving such feats as finding aspirin and Chinese takeout on the Internet.
   In Dallas, DotComGuy - that's now his legal name - has promised to live in his E-Cave house for an entire year. On his heavily sponsored website, DotComGuy.com, he explains that he's living on nothing but 'Net "to prove that it can be done."
   The 26-year-old former Marine believes that "E-commerce still intimidates too many people and we want to change that by showing its ups and downs."
   DotComGuy said he thinks ordering everything online saves time "by not having to go to the grocery store twice a week, by not having to drive across town to find an import CD." His project "can help take some of the drudgery out of day-to-day purchases."
   Visible 24/7 via 24 different cameras in his pad, DotComGuy isn't exactly a hermit. He has frequent visitors, including a girlfriend. And he's being paid handsomely. His salary began at $24 for the month of January, doubling each successive month. Doing the math, that means by Jan. 1, 2001, he'll have earned $98,280.
   Not bad for a year doing nothing more strenuous than double-clicking a mouse.
   Missing the point
   All this E-Cavery is just silliness, of course. Real people don't have five C-notes a day to blow on Internet purchases. And most of us still want to squeeze the avocados for our very own selves when we shop for groceries. As for drudgery, what's a bigger waste of time than watching the virtual hourglass get stuck as one of those retail websites tries to download on our home PC?
   As a TV news feature, this supposed look into the future of how humans will use computers as a lifeline is basically little more than documentary footage of people typing. The most dramatic hurdle the "GMA" E-cavers had to overcome was getting food orders delivered in less than 45 minutes.
   Whine dot com.
   PBS has a much better idea and far more compelling viewing in its four-part "1900 House" series, premiering in June.
   For three months last year, a middle-class family of five, the Bowlers, volunteered to live exactly as they would have in the late-Victorian era. Their V-Cave was a three-story house in Greenwich, England, that was gutted and refitted with the same plumbing and furnishings it would have had 100 years ago. The family had to dress, cook and even bathe as their elders did, a situation that had them screaming at each other in sheer frustration by Day 3.
   It's like the Loud family meets "Upstairs, Downstairs."
   I've already watched two episodes of "1900 House" and its time-travel experience provides a fascinating look at the harshness of turn-of-the century life, when doing the laundry was an all-day affair for the corset-wearing women of the family and getting a hot bath required stoking a stubborn coal-burning range.
   Getting along without computers, TV, hair dryers or even a decent bar of soap gave the Bowler family a reality check they weren't quite prepared for.
   Unlike those spoiled point-and-click E-Cavers, the Bowlers had to break a sweat to get anything done in their "1900 House." That makes for great TV.
  
  
  

 
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