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Mr. Know-It-All |
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO UNCLE EZRA,
THE ONLINE ADVICE COLUMNIST
 hOW DO I GET UP THE NERVE
to propose to my girlfriend? If Batman
is so smart, why does he wear
his underwear over his pants?
Bridge jumping doesn't seem to be a very
good option, but every time I walk over
one I keep on thinking about going over
the edge . . . Uncle Ezra,what should I do?
From silly to serious, everyone has a
question. At Cornell, someone has an
answer. Dear Uncle Ezra (http://ezra.
cornell.edu/), the University's online
advice columnist, has responded to more
than 19,000 inquiries from students,
alumni, and community members. The
site, which celebrates its twentieth anniversary
in September, is the nation's first
online counseling service.
Long before Google and Wikipedia,
there was CUInfo, the campus-wide information
system created by computer scientist
Steve Worona '70, MS '73, in 1982. In
its earliest days, this pioneering proto-Web
ran on a mainframe, listing news and information
on a handful of terminals. But the
system was only lightly used, so in 1986
Worona and Jerry Feist, then the assistant
dean of students for counseling and training,
tried to broaden the appeal. The pair
decided to make CUInfo interactive, with
students sending questions to an all-knowing
"Uncle Ezra."The name, Feist says, was
carefully chosen: "This was someone who
cares about you immediately because he's
part of your family."
Uncle Ezra debuted on September 17,
1986. The first two questions--about how
to meet people and stop procrastinating--
were fake. "We primed the pump with two
‘artificial' questions and waited to see if
the ‘build it and they will come' phenomenon
would strike,"Worona writes in an
e-mail message. "It did."
Soon, real questions poured in--
nearly three hundred in the first month.
"Why am I here?" asked Confused.
"Where can I buy a cheap used car?"
wondered No Wheels.
"Who are you?" A Nosy and Curious
Person demanded, without success.
Feist, the first of five Uncle Ezras to
inhabit the character, says that anonymity was essential. "As soon as
you
have a known person, everyone
who thinks about Uncle Ezra is
going to project certain characteristics."
Knowing age, race, or
gender could inhibit students
from asking touchy questions,
Feist felt. But, as he soon learned,
no topic was out of bounds.
"The questions were incredible--
it was so clear that the people
writing them were neophytes
to computers," he says. "But there
was a sincerity to them. They
were things people really wanted
to know."
There were a few ground
rules. Questions could not have
profanity or be used to get
homework answers, but were
otherwise unedited, typos and
all. "We decided right away that
we wanted to keep the original
flavor," says Feist.
Soon he was receiving 1,000
queries a month and using a team of
assistants to help answer them.With the
rise of the Web, Uncle Ezra moved off the
mainframe and into the wider world of
cyberspace. Two book collections have
been spun off, The Best of Uncle Ezra,Volumes
I and II, and the idea spread to other
schools. Students at the University of Colorado
seek advice from Ralphie, while at
Columbia they can Go Ask Alice.
Other colleges that tried to replicate
the formula often missed the mark,
according to Worona. "The most important
part of Uncle Ezra was the human
interaction," he recalls. "Uncle Ezra's answers were the
responsibility of a single
anonymous well-trained individual. There
was no answer-by-answer review by a
committee, and Ezra became someone the
readers could trust.Whoever had the job
understood their function as custodian of
the Ezra persona."
Feist is now an independent consultant
in Ithaca, while Worona became a
director of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association
for campus IT experts. But Uncle
Ezra lives on; the current one, as ever,
works cloaked in secrecy. "It developed a
personality and life of its own," says Feist.
-- Stephanie Bergeron |
