Penn State Deluge - Vol. 2 No. 1 - Spring 2004

In 1996, a team of forward-thinking people backed by corporate and federal grants decided to begin creating and updating an archive of the internet ("About the Internet Archive"). As the web continued to grow in popularity and size, many historians and researchers had begun to realize that great masses of information were appearing online only to disappear months, days, or minutes later, as myriad webmasters altered their sites or changed the content. This project aimed to patch up that hole in cyberspace. A vast archive—based in San Francisco and founded by Brewster Kahle—was born, offering the public millions of glimpses into webpages or web content gone by.

The four e-mail narratives scrutinized in this essay serve a similar function for cultural historians, albeit on a comparatively modest and more literary level. The novels tell us who we were, what the internet was like, and how we communicated with e-mail during the 1990s and early twenty-first century. However, as with most literature, these depictions may or may not have been central to the actual intentions of each author. In fact, the less self-conscious each happened to be in plotting the behavior and methods surrounding e-mail use at that particular moment in their view of cyberspace may actually contribute to the work's value as a cultural artifact.

Spanning less than a decade, these books show considerable differences in the characters' use of e-mail: from Chat Connect Crash's didactic explanation of e-mail shorthand to I Don't Know How She Does It's regular employment of an online vernacular; from an adult narrator not fully aware of her e-mail correspondent's identity in The Venetian's Wife to a precocious adolescent comfortably composing funny e-newsletters for a host of distant, though intimate, friends in ChaseR. One can hardly imagine the technology and practice of postal letter-writing shifting so rapidly. Even across a few centuries from the origins of epistolary fiction to present-day examples, comparatively little has changed about penning and sending letters—except for perhaps the speed with which the letters can arrive or the entities in charge of their conveyance. Any author who wishes to take up keyboard in pursuit of further e-mail narratives would do well to realize the nature of the medium. The e-mail form still feels new, even as it bears the effects of constant changeability.

At the same time, writers who choose e-mail as their primary means of narration cannot deny the importance of other equally popular and burgeoning media such as online instant messaging and mobile telephone use. David Vise of the Washington Post reported earlier this year that about 2.3 billion instant messages are sent around the world via AOL, "eclipsing e-mail as the favored way of people to communicate with family, friends and coworkers." Instant messaging, or IM, more closely mimics a conversation. It allows two or more users to chat in near simultaneity, typing brief phrases or sentences to each other in a live window. The medium is similar to the original chat-room method of real-time communication depicted in Chat Connect Crash, but IM occurs person-to-person without a separate mediator. The narrator of ChaseR laments—but does not explain—his inability to use IM with his friends, and the medium does not arise as an option in either of the other two novels. IM-focused narratives may start to appear soon, or may already be appearing, in novels and fiction, but any such decision by authors will carry with it another list of caveats, just as e-mail has done. These electronic media cannot be employed without the very essence of each one becoming a player within the drama. Whereas the letter form could more easily slip into the background of novels from Richardson on, electronic mail—or instant messaging or mobile-phone text messaging—that constitute narratives or embellish them cannot avoid attracting readers' attention, as long as the media still have the potential to shift more quickly than the ink can dry. These types of novels will continue to face the benefits and downfalls of being snapshots from the ether.

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[ Contents | Abstract | Intro | I | II | III | IV | V | VI ]
[ Notes | Works Cited | Appendix ]

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