Babel

E-mail is sexy, but it is killing the "p.s."
July 19, 1998

There are 50 ways to leave your lover according to Paul Simon. But sending a valedictory e-mail, the boy decided, having just done it, was not one of them. It was nasty, brutish and far too long.

In retrospect, this seemed inexplicable. Their romance had been nurtured by e-mail. E-mail billets doux are very much in vogue. Hundreds of thousands of them, maybe millions, are whizzing from screen to screen right now, across the country, around the world. Despite the efforts of unromantic employers to curb their illicit use, amorous e-mails are constantly spooned out during working hours. While everyone else in the office believes you to be sweating over your spreadsheets, you're having fun penning lyrical little love notes, tender or rude, or both-for your paramour's eyes only. Patrick Marber's spoof e-mail romance, in Closer, is perhaps the funniest scene on-stage in London.

The flavour of the things we read, see and hear is influenced by where we read, see and hear them. Marshall McLuhan coined his famous aphorism about all this in 1966. Television was then sweeping the world, and media gurus were starting to realise that messages delivered on the goggle-box, as it was then called, are different in kind from messages delivered by other media. They bestow instant status, glamour and prestige. An appearance in the Banbury Guardian is not the same. Not even in Banbury.

Post-1966, a plethora of new communications media have popped up. Each has its own flavour-usually ephemeral. When faxes first appeared they were frightfully urgent, frightfully important. Today most businesses use them as casually as they use paper clips. Piles of tatty paper (n?e undistributed faxes) constantly litter our fax machines, and when a new one plops on to somebody's desk they scarcely spare it a glance.

Cell-phones have similarly changed their status faster than the speed of sound. At first they were paradigms of swank, epitomes of chic. There was an inherent inference that any call on a mobile had to be pressing, had to be momentous. No longer. Now mobiles are common as muck, as are people who use them in public. Most sensible people prefer to make important calls on nice old-fashioned immobile telephones, in private, where-mirabile dictu-they can sometimes even hear what's being said.

The worldwide web's flavour is still in distillation. But e-mails already have a distinct flavour of their own and distinct advantages over the telephone.

First, compared to telephones, they do not demand instant attention, nor do they interrupt what-ever you are doing. E-mail messages do their own thing until you are ready, willing and able to deal with them. (Where e-mails get to when they're not on-screen, and why the world is not already up to its neck and drowning in internet trash, are problems cyber-ignoramuses such as myself find utterly bewildering).

Second, e-mails can be printed out or stored in the bin, either of which will allow you to refer to them later.

Third, whereas you (or I any-way) frequently say things on the telephone you fervently wish you had not, e-mails give you time to think and help banish booboos. And compared to letters, e-mails are even better.

First, you can make corrections without making a ghastly mess, without the recipient even knowing a correction has been made. That, incidentally, spells the end of the "p.s." addendum, except as a quaint literary device.

Second, even when mis-spelt, which is often, e-mails are legible. That's much more than can be said for most personal letters.

Third, e-mails are wonderfully simple to respond to, demanding neither addressing (you simply click on reply), nor stamps, nor attendant trips to letter boxes.

E-mails do have their downsides, though. Commercial e-mails, known in the trade as spam, are burgeoning, because e-mail address lists are everywhere. They aggregate in wearisome hordes when you are away (but then so do letters). Worse still, e-mails encourage those who like most of us have a tendency to drivel, on the telephone or in letters, to drivel on longer and more tediously. People become junkies, and develop an insatiable addiction to send every thought they have to everyone they know. All e-mailers, myself included, should be forced to join Drivellers Anonymous, and learn to be more abstemious.

Lacking the caress of the human voice, image and touch (so far) they are, as the boy discovered, a coldly impersonal way to deliver unpleasant personal messages. And in the US, anonymous e-mails are increasingly being used for sexual harassment of various kinds. But mostly e-mails are spiffing. Despite which, and whether you agree or not, please don't e-mail me your views.