Goodbye, cruel world!

Doing without e-mail is not minor inconvenience today. I've studied the impact of email on our lives -- and especially mine -- for several years. Brooke Fisher and I studied the impact of a campuswide e-mail outage. Anca Micu and I took a hard look at attitudes towars "spam." Now I am overseeing a thesis by Tammy McNiel that looks at the e-mail relationship between professors and students.

This is not really a Lenten activity, but the sacrifices my more religious students and colleagues make certainly inspired it. This past year, Ena Salmeen completed her doctoral comprehensive examinations while honoring her Muslim faith with a dawn-to-dusk Ramaden fast. I also came to know and admire three visiting Catholic priests/journalism scholars from the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Giving up e-mail seems trival compared to sacrificing family life.

It's just a week, but my digital fast should give me a better idea of what e-mail means to my life, and perhaps how much it has taken over that life.