Social by technology

OSLO, Norway -- For the first time in my life, I am a provider of a service in high demand.

No, I didn't turn into a pimp in my three weeks of study here at the University of Oslo despite my lavish clothes and cane. Instead, I own a laptop that can download pictures and movie files from digital cameras and burn them onto CDs.

OK, it's not as sexy as flying a two-person plane over the Mexican border with the passenger seat occupied by enough cocaine to satisfy Los Angeles' demand for a week. But I go to school with 570 students from 100 countries and the school's computers can't really be described as state-of-the-art.

Having a laptop that can download pictures from cameras bought in Budapest or Bellevue can save a student from spending money on a memory card in a country with a high standard of living and equally high prices.

For me, it's a chance to talk with someone new. With all the students here, it's easy to meet people long enough to learn their names and never see them again during the six-week quarter. While I am burning their photos, I learn a little about where they are from, what their families are like and why they are studying in Norway.

We talk about whether John Kerry can beat President Bush (my answer is always the same: I have no idea) and, since I am from San Francisco, what my thoughts are about California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But that's another column.

I have had these one-on-one chats with three people thus far. More have asked me about my laptop (although some Eastern European women seemed more apt to say they were going to use it than ask --"We are going to use your laptop, right?"). Now they know whom to go to when they run out of memory or want to copy a friend's pictures. All I ask is that they provide the CD.

But don't think I spend all of my time in my room burning other people's photos. Oslo has plenty of distractions to keep an international student from being cooped up in a dormitory or library.

In the past few days I have listened to students from the local opera school entertain a pub's patrons while sipping a $7 pint of beer (a low price here, believe me). I have also toured the Norwegian royal family's palace and walked around the country's most famous sculpture park on a rare sunny day.

And my Contemporary Norwegian Society class visited a prison for first-time offenders Monday. We heard prisoners who should be in college or high school talk about how much more they appreciate freedom and the love of their families now that they have been incarcerated.

Critics of technology say that such services as Internet shopping, instant messaging and building Web pages have turned many Americans into islands of seclusion, never venturing into the outside world from their computer-created caves. This is a fair point. One of The Daily cartoons I remember most was published during my underclassman years. It depicted a typical UW student in front of a computer, saying, "According to the Internet, it's sunny outside."

Being the owner of an iPod, I confess I put it on to remove myself from society once in a while. Technology does seem to have the disadvantage of ruining personal interaction. Think about how much time you spend writing e-mails on the computers in Odegaard or talking on your mobile phone in the Quad.

But digital cameras have to be the exception; the only way for them to be really useful is to go to the outside world and be active. When the 570 of us have returned to our 100 respective countries, we will have memories of what life was like here at the International Summer School. With pictures, we just have a better way to remember.

Burning other people's photos to a CD won't be at the top of my list of memories, but I will remember the people I met while helping them out.

How could I not? I have all of their photos on my hard drive.