The Tyranny of E-mail

by John Freeman

  Writing Our Way into Existence

  Email allows me to indulge my new meditative technique: annihilation via impersonation. I answer each letter in my interlocutor’s voice, and forty responses later I am no one and everyone.

  — DON PATERSON, The Blind Eye

  In cyberspace I can change myself as easily as I change my clothes. Identity becomes infinitely plastic in a play of images that knows no end. Consistency is no longer a virtue but becomes a vice; integration is limitation. With everything always shifting, every one is no one.

  — MARK TAYLOR AND ESA SAARINEN, “SHIFTING SUBJECTS I”

  What does it mean that you can have as many addresses on the Internet as you like, for free? That they will become an integral part of your daily life? One could argue that this isn’t an entirely new development. Anonymous letters were an issue in the past, after all, and early writers frequently wrote under a pseudonym, as do some modern writers. Benjamin Franklin made his literary debut by slipping articles under his newspaper-publishing brother’s door in the name of Silence Dogood; later on in life he published Poor Richard’s Almanack under the name Richard Saunders. C. S. Lewis published poems under the name Clive Hamilton to protect his reputation as an Oxford don. The seventeenth-century Japanese poet Matsuo Kinsaku used fifteen different haiga, or pen names, before he settled simply on Basho, which was the name of a banana plant. Mary Ann Evans used a male pen name because she wanted her work to be treated seriously: we know her as George Eliot.

  It’s not an accident that all of these examples come from writers. Until the end of the twentieth century, they were the only people with the ability to put their thoughts into writing and have them distributed to a large and ready audience. One could write a letter to the newspaper and hope the editors printed it; bang away at a novel and send it off to a publisher and wait by the mailbox for a reply. But the vast majority of people wrote to communicate person to person, via letters and postcards and occasionally by telegram.

  Now we can write for the world, or we can write to a friend. If both are posted on the Web in the form of a blog, perhaps the easiest way to publish ever created, it will be up to netizens’ search habits as to whether either is read. Similarly, the forwardability of e-mail means that these intentions are easily blurred: an e-mail to a friend may, if clever or embarrassing enough, be read by hundreds of thousands of people. An e-mail to a large group may not be read by any of them.

  The range of this possibility and the volume of text we’re creating mean that more and more people are experiencing the metaphysical and stylistic dilemma once peculiar to writers. We write our way into being. Having different identities, different voices, different e-mail addresses—which is recommended if one wants to outrun spammers—gives us a degree of agency and control over the various online environments we visit. Disguised or obscured, we can fabricate; as our professional selves, we can do business. Using an e-mail address specifically to purchase items protects us from having our personal or work e-mail inboxes from being inundated with spam. As the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would point out, though, all these identities are unstable. The “I” that means “you” is a social construction just as much as surferchick1972.

  The Internet has placed this fluidity in the most receptive medium yet. Identity roulette has been part of the Web since its early days, when people logged on to Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) in the 1970s to play an online textual version of Dungeons and Dragons. Chat rooms allowed people to be whoever they wanted to be—even though one of the first things asked of participants was “Morf” (male or female?) or, in other situations, “Sorg” (straight or gay?).

  E-mail, as it became the primary screen-to-screen, person-to-person form of discourse, has domesticated this textual identity game. A study carried out on schoolchildren in Yorkshire, England, revealed that children learn this—and the need to represent it—immediately and take advantage of it. One of them took to using the signature “xxxxxxx—*Kavita*—xxxxxxxx.” Asked later why, she responded, “I do that all the time… when I do my name on the computer and stuff…. I put my name like that cos it looks really neat and it looks boring just as a name.”

  We construct these identities visually and textually over e-mail because we can—but also because we must. As the volume of communication via e-mail increases, we need to differentiate ourselves, make our voices heard, cut through the noise. The prerogatives and seductions that once were the concern of writers, who had to keep us turning the pages, are now ours as correspondents. A distinctive voice is invaluable among friends and in business, just as it was in telling a story. “When you read a novel the voice is telling you a story; when you read a poem it’s usually talking about what its owner is feeling; but neither the medium nor the message is the point,” A. L. Alvarez writes in The Writer’s Voice. “The point is that the voice is unlike any voice you have ever heard and it is speaking directly to you, communing with you in private, right in your ear, and in its own distinctive way.” It’s not just a matter of voice, though; research has shown that people imagine their lives in stories and tend to live out their days in keeping with the narratives they tell. “The way people replay and recast memories,” wrote Benedict Carey, “day by day, deepens and reshapes their larger life story.”

  The newly democratized narrative and authorial power granted by e-mail is an unprecedented freedom and responsibility compared to previous eras of communication. The Internet has created a situation where you can be many things at once and live behind as many false identities as you choose; creating such identities is even recommended to protect your privacy. “Never give your true identity when signing up for something online,” Fred Davis, the founder and CEO of Lumeria, an Internet privacy firm, told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. The writer later added, “Another way to mask your identity is to set up free e-mail accounts, like those available at a portal site (such as Yahoo or Excite) or at Hotmail, and use them in identifying yourself around the Web.”

  The practice is widespread. In 2006, a writer at the Los Angeles Times was suspended after it was discovered that he had been posting comments under fake names, Mikekoshi and Nofanofcablecos, on his blog and those of others. “Can a company that derives economic value from its reputation for literacy, judiciousness and taste comfortably lend its imprimatur to an unfiltered online diary?” the reporter wrote in his column and on the blog, skeptical from the beginning of the experiment in the new online form. “Blogs are by nature almost impossible to censor.”

  Events like this—and the ease with which one can fabricate new online identities for e-mail or blogging—makes trust over the Internet difficult to develop and easy to smash. This destructive cycle starts early, in school, where kids have always been picked on face-to-face. Now children have to suffer in the virtual world, too. Sixty percent of cyberbullying is anonymous, and many times it comes from friends who know passwords and secrets. One of the most devastating examples occurred in Missouri. A thirteen-year-old named Megan Meier was contacted by a boy named Josh Evans online through the popular social networking site MySpace.com. “Mom! Mom! Look at him!” Meier said to her mother, pointing at his profile, which included the picture of a young, bare-chested boy with stylishly rumpled hair, asking permission to add him as a friend. Meier’s mother said yes, and soon a friendship developed over MySpace messages, which are like Web-based e-mails. Meier had been depressed, and her spirits lifted. Here is how she described herself:

  M is for Modern

  E is for Enthusiastic

  G is for Goofy

  A is for Alluring

  N is for Neglected.

  Then, just as suddenly as Meier’s neglect had ended, the messages from her new friend changed. Josh wrote, “I don’t know if I want to be friends with you anymore because I’ve heard that you are not very nice to your friends.” Other messages were blunter. Then postings appeared on bulletin boards: “Megan Meier is fat”; “Megan Meier is a slut.” The final message was downrigh
t cruel: “Everybody in O’Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you.”

  On October 16, 2006, in a tailspin after this message, Meier hanged herself. She died the next day. Six weeks later, it turned out that “Josh Evans” was actually a forty-seven-year-old woman named Lori Drew, the mother of a friend with whom Meier had lost touch after changing schools. Drew had apparently concocted the identity as a hoax and even laughed about it with other neighbors, enjoying the ability to “mess with Megan.” In the fall of 2008, Drew was convicted of just three misdemeanor charges of accessing computers without authorization. The jury declined to convict her on a felony charge of accessing a computer without authorization to inflict emotional distress.

  What Meier experienced, in an intimate, destructive, and deeply personal way, is an aggressive form of flaming—hostile or insulting communication over the Internet. It even continued after her death; a blog emerged after her death with postings claiming she’d had it coming. The anonymity afforded by the Internet has made it all too easy to criticize or roast someone publicly or right in their inbox. Like identity gymnastics, it’s been with the Internet from the beginning. “Flame messages often use more brute force than is strictly necessary,” writes Virginia Shea in Netiquette,“but that’s half the fun.” In other words, it’s a game made for “teaching lessons” that often gets out of hand.

  Trying to parse digs from duds, frenemies from simply frantic e-mailers, is a very difficult task in an environment so permeated with anonymity, speed, and lack of face-to-face interaction. Thinking too much about it can lead to a constant swirl of paranoia. Is it me, one wonders, or was that last message rude? The blogger “Elkins”—a pseudonym, by the way—astutely observed the mental self-questioning that takes place due to aggression among women on fan boards and the diabolical but very real possibility that this kind of abuse is meant to inspire such confusion, like Lori Drew “messing” with Megan Meier. Elkins’s comment could apply to aggression in any form of computer-mediated conversation, however, including e-mail:

  There’s definitely a “Gaslighting” effect to aggression which is so often denied: it serves to make the target doubt her own perception of reality. If it seems as if someone is trying to hurt you, but when confronted the person in question denies that this was at all the intent, then how do you respond? Whom do you trust? After all, you could have misinterpreted, or overreacted; and since it’s quite often a purported “friend” aggressing against you in this fashion, you really wouldn’t want to level a false accusation. Yet it’s hard for the target of, say, an extended whispering campaign to avoid the conclusion that people really are out to get her because… well, because actually? They are.

  As more and more people get connected, though, the Internet has become riddled with these ecological/emotional fires. Every interaction, it seems, has the potential to become a flame war. People’s inability to understand tone in e-mails can lead to it; so can a bad day. There’s another factor, however, that explains why people can be so rude to one another online over e-mail. We’re all working in a medium that encourages disinhibition.

  Flaming can be induced in some people with alarming ease. Consider an experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in which pairs of college students—strangers—were put in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room.

  While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved. But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude.

  — DANIEL GOLEMAN, The New York Times, 2007

  Two financial consultants who don’t know each other are corresponding over e-mail to set up a meeting. The woman signs off with her contact information, asking, “Is there anything else I can provide?” Her cohort, whom she has just “met,” replies, “How about a picture?” A book editor receives an e-mail from someone he met once that begins “It’s been a hard year for me” and ends with details of the writer’s mental breakdown. A manager of artists e-mails a booker to say his singer cannot appear because she has fallen ill. Facing a hole in his schedule, the booker fires off an angry reply: “If she is sick, which I sincerely doubt, I wish her a speedy recovery, but let her know she has really put us out.”

  These are all examples of what psychologists call disinhibition—a filter drops, and we write things we probably wouldn’t say to another in person, at least not after such a brief acquaintance. No environment induces it quite as easily as computer-mediated communication. Indeed, the PC may have extended the human mind, but it’s missing a few key human circuits that modulate social interaction. Neurologists now know that many of the key mechanisms of communication reside in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain. “These circuits instantaneously monitor ourselves and the other person during a live interaction,” wrote Daniel Goleman on www.edge.org, “and automatically guide our responses so they are appropriate and smooth.” One of the key tasks of these circuits is inhibiting “impulses for actions that would be rude or simply inappropriate—or outright dangerous.”

  But awkward as it sometimes feels to be inside it, our body, as it turns out, is the best, most sophisticated interface for appropriate communication. It has multiple valences; it has smell, touch, taste, and sight. It allows us to keep ourselves in check by providing real-time, continuous feedback from another person: facial expressions, the slightest twitch of an eyebrow, gestures, pauses, eye contact, the squeeze of an arm. Our bodies often embarrass us. “Man is the sole animal whose nudity offends his own companions,” wrote Montaigne, “and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.”

  The desire to transcend our fleshly envelope, to find a purer, more seamless form of talking and being is understandable— Emerson’s transparent eyeball was in fact an extension of that wish. Communication technology, however, has been catering to that desire with increasing ability, from the telegram to the telephone, even if it is, in an idealized way, putting us right back into the idea of our bodies. It’s a temporary relief, as we’re discovering, sometimes not one at all. In Nicholson Baker’s novel Vox, a man and a woman talk over a sex hotline. “I called tonight I think out of the same impulse,” she says, “the idea that five or six men would hear me come, as if my voice was this thing, this disembodied body, out there, and as they moaned they would be overlaying their moans onto it, and, in a way, coming onto it, and the idea appealed to me, but then when I actually made the call, the reality of it was that the men were so irritating, either passive, wanting me to entertain them, or full of what-are-your-measurements questions, and so I was silent for a while, and then I heard your voice and I liked it.”

  There’s a paradox here to this woman’s experience on the chat line. The disinhibiting factors of the telephone that allow her to perform her own orgasm before a group of strangers for the same reason also work on the other participants on the line: they can bark requests, relax in passivity, measure and assess nakedly and publicly, but without having to be seen. The same is true for written interactions over the Internet, but even more so. As Goleman says, “The Internet has no means to allow such realtime feedback (other than rarely used two-way audio/video streams). That puts our inhibitory circuitry at a loss—there is no signal to monitor from the other person. This results in disinhibition: impulse unleashed.”

  Another explanation of disinhibition leads back to the brain, having less to do with our “filters” and more with nuts-and-bolts functionality. One of the fastest-growing areas of neuroscience is the study of mirror neurons, highly active cells in our nervous system that, when we watch an action performed by another person, “fire,” sending pulselike waves of voltage across cell membranes and creating the sensation that what we are watching is actually something we
are doing or experiencing ourselves. Transcranial magnetic stimulation—the sending of low-voltage electric charges to parts of the brain to study its functionality— has confirmed this research.

  The study of mirror neurons is still developing, but it is beginning to shed light on motor and language development, and also empathy. We may cry at the sight of a sad friend, screw up our face when we see someone react to a bad smell, or cringe when we see someone punched, because we are mirroring what she is experiencing. Research by the French-German neuroscientist Christian Keysers at the University of Groningen Social Brain Lab and others has shown that people who identify themselves as empathic on self-questionnaires have stronger mirror neuron activity.

  The ramifications this research presents for communicating over e-mail are enormous. The visual absence of the person we are in exchange with deprives us of a deep-seated, physical identification with the actions and emotions of others. Marco Iacoboni, the author of Mirroring People, says the effects of this are writ large on the Internet: “The rudeness and aggressiveness over the internet—e-mails, blogs, Web forums, etc.—is likely due to the fact that people cannot look into each other’s faces and cannot activate mirror neurons, thus cannot activate a very basic process of empathy for other human fellows.”

  Streams of invective trickle down message boards; comment queues of blogs are marinated in snark, with people blasting the host or one another with angry put-downs. Feedback sections of video-broadcasting sites, such as YouTube, are often a study of life without empathy. At the X Games in 2007, the skateboarder Jake Brown survived a horrifying four-story fall while attempting to land a 720—two-spin (rotation)—on a 293-foot half-pipe called the Mega Ramp. Brown completed the 720 but lost his skateboard on the final ramp, falling fifty feet to the ground and landing with such force his shoes exploded off his feet. For four agonizing minutes, he lay unconscious, potentially paralyzed or dying. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha,” wrote one viewer in the comment queue of a YouTube posting of the video. “HIS SHOES POPPED OFF. LOL LOL,” wrote another.