I lie about email.

I don’t mean I lie, IN email, although I probably do that, too. But I lie about email ALL the time.

Mostly I tell people I don’t have any. This is believable because I’m enough of an odd duck that such Luddite tendencies wouldn’t surprise anyone. On such occasions as I am forced to confess that I do have it, I do so grudgingly.

What is it about email that makes it such a miserable medium of communication?

Well, for one thing, it’s somewhat unreliable. People think of it as instantaneous, and it’s not. Sometimes I get time-sensitive materials on time, and sometimes they sit in the electronic pouch of a server on some form of multi-day digital bender. There’s no redress with this, either. Nothing is more corporate and indifferent than the dis-corporate “net”.

Second to that is it’s too darn free. It used to be that the only people laboring to send me multiple pages of their paranoid fantasies had computer skills. Now anyone can point, click, and send reams of urban legends, off color jokes and links to political commentary. If Gutenberg had foreseen Jacqueline Suzanne, he’d have melted movable type into some nice spoons. Similarly with the “free flow of information” on the internet.

Third, it’s a horribly passive-aggressive way to communicate. Once you have set your little boat adrift, whether anyone got your communication is their lookout. People, in my experience, routinely change the dates and locations of meetings, assign tasks, and call for funds in a method that is similar to leaving a note tucked under a certain rock. If that didn’t work when every member of the Spy club was living for the moment when they’d discover a new note under the rock, why would it work now?

This brings me to another thing I lie about when I talk about email. This lie may be less a lie than an inability to tell the whole truth. And the statement is, “I don’t get to my email.”

Now, truth is, sometimes I watch my email like a skinny cat a large mouse-hole. Sometimes I check it frequently. And SOMETIMES, the weather’s nice and I just don’t. Or I’m out of town. Or the server has hiccups. Or I’m newly in love.

I find there are generally more reasons not to look at email than to look at it.

This has no effect on the emailing demons on my list, however. Any brief pause in my attention to my inbox results in many pages of ipse dixit communications of greater and lesser importance, notice of arts events, invitations to fundraisers, forwards with animations, and the general detritus of assaults on my schedule. Also, as I’ve mentioned, changes in things I’ve already planned.

I sift through this with more or less patience, looking for direct communication.

In essence, email exacerbates the difficulties of any human relations. It makes clear that most of what we flatter ourselves is “communication” involves far more talking than listening. It reinforces our sense of injury that we are not the center of all universes. It magnifies our credulity. It enables us to gossip with fewer immediate consequences. And it gives us another mask to cover our authentic selves.

It’s a choice, of course. Email could be an ennobling way of making sure that the people you love know it. Maybe we could make that a holiday, a sort of electronic Rosh Hashanah, when we spoke no ill in email, neither gossiped, nor played pranks with blind carbon copying, nor larded up people’s days with indirect or self-centered messages.

I’d open all my mail on THAT day. And we’d be well written and sealed.