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POV... Email Lovers Deleted with Impunity
by barbara sumner burstyn
it can't be good for you
There's a series of tests you can take to see if you have
an unhealthy relationship with your computer and specifically
your email program.
It takes a while, almost twenty minutes - a major commitment
in modem times - so I decide to take this seriously, even though
it seems to have escaped the purveyors of the test that if you've
surfed long enough to have found this obscure bite of web-life
then you don't need a test - your diagnosis is obvious.
Email was always destined for indispensability. It has all the
ingredients for addictive personality types, going far beyond
just the feeling of pleasure at hearing from a friend.
Email is ego supporting, instant gratification, as if self-esteem
is tied inexorably to the fullness of your inbox. Five a day,
the test states - is the optimum number of times you can safely
check your email without risking addiction. So I decide to keep
a log.
Before I've even finished the test I realize I've checked maybe
three times. I dump the log and console myself with a quick check,
after all, I work from home, doing email is no different than
coffee breaks and post-it notes and quick chats at the water cooler
of ordinary office life.
The significance of smudged and fading keyboard letters and the
little trough on the space bar somehow eludes me. I finish the
test and email it away. A smiley face pops up, thanking me for
'sharing so honestly'. I get that 'going to the dentist' feeling.
The results will be in my in-box within the hour.
That I had a life: any life, pre email, and the web amazes me.
I access more information in a month than my grandparents had
in their lifetime. And just as air travel and the telephone revealed
a universe beyond the town, the web has opened up my hearts desire
and more.
At the strike of a key I can buy exotic things, read magazines,
book trips and concerts, get medical advice, send gifts, find
love, resolve disputes, send an insult - anonymous of course -
plan my funeral, own a virtual dog and even visit a psychologist
- all on-line, all with great ease.
But is it really without consequence? I'm having so many relationships
out there I'm forgetting how to be right here, right now.
My conquests are becoming so cerebral that I've almost forgotten
how to make eye contact or read body language.
Some mornings I don't even bother to get up; the battery of my
laptop creating a warm patch on the bed beside me. I've even fallen
asleep, propped up by pillows, mid sentence to someone, somewhere
out there.
And I'm always in email trouble.
It starts innocently enough, a chance meeting, a few well-chosen
words, and then suddenly I'm in a flurry of phrases. And because
it comes in perfectly formed sentences, not the staccato of real
talking, the excitement is enhanced, spread over hours, or days.
Where once I would stand at a bar with a perfectly poised martini
making myself up, now it's the on-line structure of my words that
do the damage. Where once it was the stance, the pitch of the
laugh, the toss of the head, now it's the cadence of words, the
structure of the sentence, the pithy reference in the subject
line and we go from stranger to new best friend almost overnight.
But as fast as they spring up, cyberfriends whither in cybertime
- those bites of moments rather than the months or years it takes
to grow 'real' relationships - bored by the narrowness of the
context, embarrassed when they try to infiltrate their real life,
enticed away by another well turned word.
Deleted with impunity.
But there are other advantages, aren't there? I can work from
home, avoid traffic jams, surly shop assistants and irate pedestrians
or anything at all that irritates or annoys me. I never have to
listen to anyone else's opinion or endure a tirade from a colleague
or even have my ears blasted by the guy with the bible standing
on the downtown corner. And just as the railroad across American
was set to end segregation the Web is welding us into one homogenous
community sans frontiers.
But is it? In the antithesis of the hype I am discovering that
my virtual life is shrinking my world with self-interest, not
expanding it with knowledge and opportunity. It's as if I now
believe myself to be separate from other people's realities, the
compulsion to get alongside someone, to listen to a tale different
from my own has receded. My community used to be the Indian upholster
around the corner, the refugee family who moved in down the street
or the woman who works in the local pharmacy. But now I buy my
furniture on-line, read about people like my refugee neighbours
in my customized virtual newspaper and buy my medications and
cosmetics from the dot com pharmacy.
The web allows me to believe that I need nothing and no one except
my modem, and my rampant individualism. I can insulate my self
from any reality except the one I create inside my laptop. And
increasingly as I live on a diet of my own personal concerns,
my neighbourhood, once a local amalgam of difference has now become
a global conglomerate of special interest. Like all diets I'm
getting thinner as increasingly community means people just like
me; disconnected, narrow and self interested.
In short, instead of expanding my life, email, the web and my
addiction to it has caused my world to grow around itself. Hermetically
sealed in my own image I find I am increasingly shut into an emotional
and intellectual gated community, something akin to a National
Geographic experience of reality. But underneath it all I still
crave for community, for relevance, for connection, for the corner
dairy and the butcher who knows my name, for real soil and a dog
that barks, not bleeps at me. So now I'm making an effort to step
away from my screen, away from my emails and the distant instant
sycophantic friends, the witty repartee, and the incessant appetite
for information that becomes meaningless in the barrage. I'm going
to shop local and talk to my neighbours and catch a bus more often.
Maybe I'll even organize the worlds first 'step away from your
screen' day just to see if it makes a difference. But before I
do I think I'll just check my emails one more time, to see if
my test is back.
The results fill my screen. It seems I have a serious form of
IA (internet addiction). The smiley face pops up, offering me
hope - a 12-step 14-day Cyber Stress Cure program. On line of
course.
©Barb Sumner Burstyn,
April 2002
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