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

1. As with most new items of modern technology, the name for electronic mail has evolved over the years. It began as two separate words, and then quickly became abbreviated as "E-mail." As the medium grew in popularity, the letter "e" went lowercase in most uses. Some latter-day writers even drop the hyphen in the word. "E-mail" began as a noun and adjective, but speakers and writers also started using it as a self-contained verb without the use of "via" or "through"—for example: "She e-mailed me yesterday" or "He often e-mails me."

In noun form, "e-mail" could mean the overall method of communication or a single message sent between computers. Writers first dubbed a group of online letters "e-mail messages," but English speakers started leaving off the word "messages" and pluralizing the adjective, referring to several electronic messages as "e-mails." Many dictionaries and style guides have not yet accepted this usage, but linguists have recognized its pervasiveness in mainstream speech and writing. Newspapers and books (such as ChaseR: a Novel in E-mails) are using the plural form "e-mails" much more often now. Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, published in 1999, acknowledges that the debate over whether to use the hyphen continues decades after the invention of electronic mail, but the guide's authors do not hesitate to support the form without a hyphen. "It's only a matter of time," they maintain. "Get with the program" (Hale 78).

This essay will employ different forms of the name and verb as occasion or the various texts warrant. A newspaper article, which offers a snapshot of the overarching debate from early 2001, appears in Appendix I.

2. The word internet appears in lowercase within this essay to reflect the medium's kinship to other broad media such as television and radio, both of which are now almost universally recognized as common nouns and not proper ones.

3. While Werther exists outside the English-language tradition of literature, its popularity in translation was so great that it can be included understandably in the purview of this essay.

4. During the 1980s and early 1990s, some companies even offered services that allowed computer users to type e-mail messages and have them delivered by traditional mail. These services did not catch on, and are almost nonexistent today. (Hafner)

5. The original movie itself was based on the 1937 play Parfumerie by Miklós László of Hungary. This tale of epistolary romance also has spawned at least two musicals.

6. These represent very thinly veiled references to America Online profiles, and include the same categories, such as location, birth date, sex, marital status, computers, occupation, and interests.

7. Her borrowing from the language of the drug culture feels more common in present usage than it would have when William S. Burroughs wrote Junky. For middle- and upper-class users of e-mail and other electronic media in 2003, the need to constantly feel connected does not represent antisocial or objectionable behavior, but instead has become something of the norm for those with access to it.

8. Not all reviews see the novel's use of e-mail as a successful or logical choice. India Knight, in a mostly complimentary take on the novel in The Guardian of London, questions the abbreviations that dot some e-notes: "She has friends whom she never sees but with whom she exchanges improbably naff e-mails (do women in their thirties really write 'gr8' and 'C U', like nerds?)." The review in the Financial Times, the newspaper most tied up with the culture of London's City district, compares the e-mail exchanges with her female friends to the wailing of a "Greek chorus" in a lame latter-day attempt at a tragicomedy (Sale). Roxanne Roberts of The Washington Post, whose review says the book paints a caricature of the working mother's life, sees the e-mail device as one more attempt to "stack the deck" in the protagonist's favor. "All Kate's employed friends are funny and supportive, so she finds plenty of time for cute e-mails bemoaning her crazy life." Roberts continues, "It's one thing to be a busy mom, it's another to be self-absorbed and careless - and blame it on working motherhood." One reviewer—Jane Shilling in the Sunday Telegraph of London—even goes so far as to compare the entire novel to the messages therein: It's "as readable as a gossipy e-mail," she writes.

9. Allison Pearson's Kate Reddy began as the archetypal busy woman in a newspaper column the author wrote for London's Evening Standard, and the traditional narration in the novel inevitably mimics the voice of a newspaper columnist occasionally, with its broad-sweeping pronouncements on modern life.

10. Conti conducts his online business under the auspices of the "Conti Foundation" (Bantock 81). Also worthy of note: This device recalls to some degree the ventriloquism employed by the antagonist in Charles Brockden Brown's novel Wieland.

11. A now-famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon appeared with the caption: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." See Appendix II.

12. Hacking, in computer terms, means the gaining of unlawful entry to another's computer system for mischievous or devious purposes, often using advanced internet-based techniques.

[ Works Cited >> ]

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

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