Yesterday, a rather peculiar thought struck me about email, and how it has become a very personal and integral part of people. People are very touchy about others reading their emails, and most people safeguard their emails as if they were an extension of their own being. I am myself like that, and often resort to paranoia at while to assure that nobody except me reads my emails. And companies offering email security have only made it more paranoid.
There was a time though, email was simple, and didn’t raise blood pressure levels like it does today. Around 1997 when Internet and email were just launched in Hubli, it was very expensive – at around 60 bucks an hour, students could hardly afford to surf the net, not that there were any great sites out there either.
It used to be an event of sorts when someone went to check their emails. The moment someone came to know that we were going to “Internetâ€, friends would simply holler – “Arre yaar – check my email too man! This is my username and password!†We would write everybody’s username and password on piece of paper and then at the Internet center, check each mail for each of our friends – not that they received too many. Once back, we used to catch up on each friend and let him know about what emails he received. It was that simple. There was nothing personal about email, and anybody would check anybody’s email.
Then time went by, and people began to have more emails. Now after a year, the internet prices had come down to 40 bucks an hour, and number of email services had gone over. Friends would now give us multiple accounts and passwords to check emails. Often times we used to mess up one guy’s emails with another! But still the purpose of email was still not a personal matter. I personally had around 6 email addresses on 6 different sites then, and would usually give at least 2 email accounts for others to check on my emails. (And I must admit here, that for a good 6 months it never dawned on me that it would have made more sense to have 1 single username and password across 6 sites. Instead, I used to carry a cheat sheet with me, neatly tabular, containing the username and password for each site!).
Then, the Internet rage caught on – More cyber cafes sprang up, and Internet became cheaper and cheaper and became really affordable to 10 to 15 Rs per hour. Now it was not necessary for our friends to tell us to check their emails, neither did we have to tell them as well. Suddenly, email became a personal thing of sorts. People would no longer discuss nor be privy to other’s emails. Friends changed their passwords overnight, lest “someone from the hostel†remembered their password and would snoop on their emails. Formerly when it was expensive, two friends would use the same PC to surf the Internet on the same PC, thereby sharing the cost of it – now, two friends would sit on two different PCs, and would make sure that the other guy did not know about personal emails he received.
Ten years down the lane, this has started to become an obsessive compulsion disorder – and I observe, its not just me, but everyone around me as well. People love to check emails – it’s a part of daily ritual – you wait for people to mail you, so that you can mail back to that person, and then again wait for someone else to mail you. Everything revolves around email; weekend plans are made in an email thread; vacation plans are fortified in emails; movies are discussed and decided upon in emails. Almost everything that could be said, can be said via emails.
And the more and more we have began to rely on email as a part of human communication, the more we’ve seem to grow touchy about it. Even me – I would hate it if anybody, including my family members would read my email. Email to me is sacred, holy and something to which I am only privy too – anyone else trying to even get a whiff about it makes me paranoid. And I observe similar behavior with people around me. I know people who don’t use Gmail because Google computers read your email! We are even scared of computers reading our emails in this age. Many check their personal email outside of office lest someone in their office snoops on their emails. Email seems to have become such a sacred part of our existence, that our sanctity depends on it, and we must make sure nobody in the world can touch it.
And then I sometimes wonder. Why am I being so paranoid about it anyways? Exactly what is it about email that is so damn personal? I shudder at the thought of next big thing that technology will bring us. As I have maintained, technology was suppose to make life simpler – and yet human life seems to be hell bent on treading the opposite path.