My Email Pal

My long-term email pal and her husband are off on vacation to Mexico this weekend.

That means no email confessionals until Sunday.

It's strange how attached one can become to technology; I remember a time when there was no email, but I don't know how I'd really get along without it now. Blogs are somewhat the same — a new development that's changing the landscape without our even noticing.

Well, until the year of the Blogger, we didn't notice.

I have reservations about email, sometimes. I have reservations about blogging, too. Both allow for some sort of vaguely permanent and vaguely public record of whatever the blogger/emailer chooses to mention. Email's at least nominally private, but blogs aren't. And they're not meant to be.

Both raise issues of privacy. Because both can be like what would once have been a journal. Except that practically anyone can read them.

I once thought I'd keep all my email, because it would provide a record of the mundane. And that it would be a great resource for some biographer some day after I was both famous and dead.

I'm not famous yet, so there's no need. But I've also, since making that decision, lost a number of computer hard drives. And changed jobs a few times. And all that email just vanishes.

Looking back, though, my email tends toward the mundane. And the obsessive.

But there sure is a lot of it. I don't know exactly how prolific I could have been if I'd spent half the time that I've spent wrapped up in my own little email world writing something...useful and productive. I'll wager I could write a novel in a year or less — with that time alone.

It's not that email is bad; my email pal and I have communicated exclusively via email for about the past five years or so, and in many ways we're closer friends now than we ever were before email arrived. But it's definitely a strange relationship. Because it exists entirely in the words of our emails and in the gaps between sending one and getting the next.

And, for me, it's certainly cheaper than therapy.

The issue with the blog is bigger, I guess, because the blogger is blogging for the masses. Or would like to think he is. And that online trick applies, too. Anonymity allows for the creation of an entire personality. If the blogger wishes to adopt a different personality, all he has to do is adapt.

I remember reading Umberto Eco's comments in Wired a long time ago. To the best of my recollection, he said that the problem with the Internet is that we don't yet know the signs and symbols of it — as a form of discourse. So we can't tell what's reliable and credible and what isn't.

But of course, the problem with that analysis is that there are as many different signs, symbols, tropes, and variations as there are among people. I don't know how we'll ever make sense of it, really. Because the blog is limited only by the blogger's imagination and his willingness to take chances. And that means, over time, anything's possible.

If Eco was implying that there'd be a way to know whether a piece of information could be trusted or whether an e-commerce site was safe for consumers, then I suspect the Internet has been around long enough for us to have some ideas of how it works. With respect to the big sites, anyway, those things are obvious.

But with respect to how you know — from reading an individual blog — whether that's the "real" person, or whether the facts recounted are accurate, well now....

That's a much thornier issue.

And even that debate shies away from the issue of what one can or should say about others — people one knows in the real world — on the blog.

I'd begun this entry thinking I'd perhaps post about a phone conversation I had with another friend tonight, given the absence of my email confidante. But that conversation was between the two of us and wasn't meant for consumption by the general public. Whether I use names or don't.

I'm occasionally worried that reluctance on my part to post personal stories negatively impacts my blog. The conclusion I've come to for now is that friendship is more important than whether or not my blog fascinates other people. And that blogs are meant for posting about things, not people.

For instance: I bought a huge external drive the other day, and I'm going to rip all my CDs to iTunes so that my long-neglected pop collection will possibly get some playtime on the a/v system. And besides, it's just cool.

Saying that affects nobody. Except the guy who is thinking of breaking into my house and stealing that stuff.

But hopefully, he's not reading my blog.

My point is: there's always a risk, because he could be.

As someone said, the fact that you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not after you.

And these are the things I think about when nobody's around.