Oh Joe, I know you're dyin' for a little stimulating (and non food-related) conversation. How about this, from today's NYT? (A topic we've both had experience with. -g)
July 8, 2001
Dear World: Loose Lips Sink More Than Ships
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
ADE — I love you, I really do,"
wrote a University of Tennessee
administrator, Pamela S. Reed, to J. Wade
Gilley, the school's president, in a May 27
e-mail, "and I will never make a statement to the press or anyone else that could
harm you about our relationship."
Unfortunately, she already had, simply by using e-mail. More than 900 pages of
e-mails from Ms. Reed to Mr. Gilley became public recently, after The Chattanooga
Times Free Press demanded their release, having learned that the university was
investigating whether Ms. Reed had falsified her résumé. On June 14, the
investigation concluded that she had, and Ms. Reed resigned. Dr. Gilley had retired
two weeks earlier, citing personal and health reasons.
Peter Chung also thought e-mail was private, and so is out of a job as an associate
in the Seoul office of the Carlyle Group investment firm. Last May he was fired, just
a couple of weeks after an exuberant e-mail to some friends made its way around
the world and came to the attention of his bosses. In it, he bragged about his sex life
and the degree to which local bankers competed for his favor with lavish dinners,
golf outings and the like. "LIFE IS GOOD," he exulted before the ax fell.
Almost everybody treats e-mail as if it was private — like real mail. But it's not. It's
not at all. Why don't, or why can't, people learn better?
It may have to do with the very nature of e-mail communication. "E- mail has a way
of lulling people into thinking that the medium is private — even people who say that
they know better," said Sherry Turkle, a professor of the sociology of science at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of "The Second Self: Computers
and the Human Spirit."
And Robert Ellis Smith, the publisher of the monthly newsletter Privacy Journal,
notes that the design of e-mail programs makes self-betrayal absurdly easy.
Absentmindedly clicking on "reply to all' instead of "reply to author," is all it takes,
he said. One's detailed message of love or hate or intent to commit a crime may end
up in every mailbox in a company — rather than in the solitary soul's it was intended
for.
EVEN properly addressed e-mail tends to wander. Microsoft's chairman, Bill
Gates, found that out when a blunt May 1997 message to subordinates that he was
"hard-core about NOT supporting" a piece of Sun Microsystems technology was
used against his company in the federal government's antitrust lawsuit. Vito
Sperduto, an investment banker at Wit Capital, received the same lesson when his
e-mail about how much to pay for the stock of Staples.com showed up in a lawsuit
alleging that the price was too high.
Ms. Turkle of M.I.T. says that many Americans equate e-mail with paper mail,
which enjoys strong legal, and social, protections against snooping. Even though
they know e- mail might not be secure, she said, many people think of it as being
like talking with friends in a bar. "You're surrounded by other people but you don't
experience those other people as having a microphone at your table," she said.
Ms. Turkle also notes that sending and receiving e-mail are very different
experiences. Composition occurs in a zone of intimacy, which leads people to write
things they might not otherwise risk broadcasting to the world.
"The act of composing e-mail occurs within your private mindspace," she said. "The
only place where people are quiet and not being bombarded is in front of the
machine."
But the recipient is often in a completely different state of mind. "A hundred
messages come up; the experience of receiving this thing is that you are being
bombarded," Ms. Turkle said. This breeds an attitude that no e-mail should be
taken too seriously. Instead, the harried recipient thinks, "Oh, cool, I'll pass this on,"
and with a mouse click sends a piece of correspondence around the world, like a
computer virus.
Edward Tenner, an historian of science and the author of "Why Things Bite Back"
(Knopf, 1996), said that advanced technologies often produce unpleasant side
effects, unintended results so damaging that they almost seem motivated by some
animus on the part of the technology.
This "revenge effect" can be seen in automotive air bags, for instance. They save
many lives, but can also kill children and small adults, whose body sizes fall outside
of the bags' zone of safe inflation. In the case of an e-mail that wounds its author,
Mr. Tenner said, "in many cases, the technology worked as advertised."
That is a scary idea. Human ingenuity has devised a technology that makes each of
us potentially the biggest enemy of our own privacy. When it comes to e-mail, all of
us are living in glass houses. Thanks to the global reach of the Internet and the
ubiquity of e-mail, human beings now have awesome power to inform upon
themselves, and perhaps the psychological inability to do anything about it. |
