What happens to e-mail…
What happens to e-mail happens to us. We delete each other. We bounce, trash, junk and leave each other unread or misfiled. It’s not surprising. 
Human minds created the computer and the Internet, so of course they would go on doing what they had always done, but with more dispatch.
We can train an e-mail program to identify junk mail, but if we want to express our particular displeasure we bounce e-mail. This is much the same way we filter people. There are certain “kinds” of people we categorize and screen out, but once in a while we feel compelled to snub someone.
We complain of torrents of e-mail: phishing expeditions, spam, erectile dysfunction remedies, fake Rolexes, lotteries we never entered, Dickensian Nigerian scams, but what is different is that now we have a computer model for what has always happened.
Somebody has always been rolling up his sleeve to show us fake watches. We have always been phished and scammed, often from the pulpit and the bandstand. Now we just train a program to filter it or hit a button, smile and move on. There is no danger the person we have rebuffed will drop his coffee on us, and if he bad-mouths us we won’t see or hear it.
What is missing is the vibe. We can readily see that the ED hucksters are not native speakers, so that provides a certain distance from them. We don’t get much of a vibe from the Internet, the way we do when eyes meet at a party or a rally or in the street. E-mail is a metaphor without the vibe. Good writing, of course, puts the vibe back in words, but there isn’t much good writing in our daily dose of e-mail, is there?
And yet there is no reason there shouldn’t be. Just because the quill gives way to the pen, and calligraphy to movable type, and typewriter to computer doesn’t mean we can’t write well. All we have to do is want to write well. So, perhaps when we get over the novelty, we’ll do just that. After all, there never was a time when a great deal of phish and spam wasn’t written.—DM
And yet. . . There’s something very different about the e-mail and responses to it. I’ve been shocked by vitriol that the anonymity brings–and I don’t mean necessarily not knowing the person, but the lack of face to face relationship that even print on paper gives the reader and author. I don’t do text messaging, but that must be even worse.
Recently, to add to my loan offers I’ve been getting e-mail spam in Russian.
Yes, I know what you mean about the vitriol. It seems to me that somehow we’re losing the knack of talking to each other respectfully, even when we disagree. Sad to say, I first noticed this in church, the last place I had expected to find it. I would like to think that we can disagree and yet value each other’s viewpoints and treat each other with respect. It seems to me that society depends on this. But, like you, I see an ugliness in the anonymity of e-mail. Of course, it also shows up in venues like talk radio, whether it’s politically left or right. We need to listen to each other, not just yak in each other’s faces, don’t you think?—DM