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You might imagine that I love computers. After all, I have a rather large web site. I make my living doing graphic design, and at night I moonlight as a novelist. Altogether, I have my hands on a keyboard or a mouse about twelve hours a day. I hear you exclaim, twelve hours a day, Jefferson? You must love computers.
God, give me a break.
You know what those twelve hours a day gets me? Headaches. Sure, without my computer I'd be useless, probably working behind the counter of a 7-11 or begging for pennies on Telegraph Avenue. But when you work with anything twelve hours a day, you learn every little annoying, idiosyncratic, and downright infuriating aspect of it. Computers have far more than their fair share of annoyances. I could write a billion columns about how computers bug the shit out of me, but today I'm really pissed off at my e-mail.
If you're a regular around these parts, you are aware that I have a good friend named Tracy who lives on the opposite coast from me. Our only ways of talking are either on the phone (which is very expensive), via Internet chat (which is very time-consuming), or e-mail. A large amount of our friendship takes place over e-mail, so we depend on it far more than many people. This is fine, as long as it's working right. Recently, it stopped working right, and it just about had us at each other's throats.
For the longest time, I would send e-mail to her office during the day, and vice versa. From the time one of us hit "send" to the time it hit the other's mailbox, you might have had enough time to grab a cup of coffee. Maybe. It was seductively close to real time, and we got used to it. In the last few weeks, though, it's gone all kerflooey. Now we have enough time for a long leisurely lunch while we wait for our e-mail to arrive. Sometimes we could take a Hawaiian vacation, I swear.
You can imagine what happened. All of a sudden, we're not getting any responses to our e-mails. At first we started feeling lonely, just missing each other. We're used to hearing from each other pretty well constantly, after all. We each figured the other person was too busy at work to respond right away. Then, after a couple of hours, those niggling doubts started to creep in our minds. Had we said something wrong? So we followed up with another e-mail to that effect. Still, no response. Having no idea that our messages weren't getting through, we each assumed the other was simply ignoring them. That led us to get quite upset with each other. When we figured out what had happened, a whole day later, we were a bit embarrassed, to say the least.
Sure, maybe we were overreacting to the sudden lack of communication, but the point is, the technology failed, and it chose exactly the moment we'd come to depend on it to fail.
E-mail is seductively simple. At first, it's like putting a message into a bottle and dropping it in the ocean. You're not really sure anyone will ever read it, but when you get a response, it's great! Then it all clicks. Write a letter. Push a button. Send a letter. That's it. No icky stamps or envelopes to lick. No walk to the corner mailbox. No waiting three days for it to get there. Push the button, say the magic words, and presto! Instant communication. It works, so you let yourself depend on it. We take it on faith, just like we take it on faith that when we put our key into the ignition and crank, the car will start. But when you turn that key and it won't start, it's more frustrating than a pack of weasels making a nest in your shorts.
Even when it is working according to specifications, e-mail is a medium rife with pitfalls.
First, there's the problem of how the text is displayed. Handwriting, even the most cramped and dense, is warm. It conveys the personality of the writer as much, and sometimes more, than the words. Few things are as personal as handwriting. Most typefaces designed for digital display are very cold, very regular; they strip most of the personality, the inflection, from the words. The reader ends up filling in these things, often from his own feelings of the moment. E-mail is like a Rorschach test in this regard; everyone sees something different in it. If you're angry when you're reading e-mail, you're more likely to see anger or sarcasm in the cold digital type on the screen, and you're more likely to respond in kind. The result? Flame wars. Hurt feelings. Damaged friendships.
This is why I refuse to carry on deep, meaningful discussions via e-mail. The medium isn't stable enough or expressive enough to support it. The odds of misunderstanding, even with the best of intentions, are so much higher than other forms of communication that I wouldn't trust anything truly important to it. If I have to work out a disagreement with a friend, or break some bad news to somebody, give me the phone, or even an Internet chat room. But don't make me do it over e-mail. It's still too much like putting a message in a bottle.

All contents of Skaldheim (C) 2001 by Jefferson Krogh.
URL: http://skaldheim.com/musings/growls/growl5.html
Revised: August 9, 2001.