Fear and e-Loathing

An e-mail "fast" has an amazing effect on one's peers.

The initial reaction of most of my colleagues was "how can you do that?" mixed with the occasional "Good luck, but I just could bear to try it." I've made a point to watch the eyes of folks when I tell them I am not available by e-mail this week. Often there is real panic in those eyes -- the "deer in headlights" syndrome.

And then there are those who are just flat angry. Fritz Cropp was livid when he told me he had to send some information to my department secretary because he could not send it to me by e-mail. He had taken the Lenten reference in my "away" message a bit too literally and launched into a lecture on how what I was doing was "just not in the spirit of Lent."

"It is not right if you are making it hard on everyone else," he explained.

An interesting point. But can we withdraw from any common practice in our society without causing hardship on our colleagues? A vegetarian makes his host search through new cookbooks. A newly reformed drinker makes his friends uncomfortable about the cocktail in their hands. And what is more obnoxious than a strident dieter?

I'm getting strong indications from my conversations of the past two days that e-mail has gone from a simple communications method to a social/physical phenomenon akin to cigarette smoking. People tell me of dashing to the computer as soon as they awake and checking it "just one last time" before going to bed at night. They say they cannot cope with the idea of not having instant access to their friends and co-workers.

In fact, the greatest "fear factor" of my experiment is the notion that the messages in my e-mail inbox won't eventually be read. "How will you know what's there?" they ask. The notion that one can ignore a message seems beyond comprehension.

Of course, we have always ignored messages. I throw away unopened junk mail almost every day (although I must admit it took several years before I could teach myself to do that). Who among us has not had a pleasant conversation with our own brain while our spouse is telling us a long and detailed story? And I know from frequent experience that students quite often ignore anything I say in a lecture.