E-mail

E-mails have been a good part of human communication since the prevalence of the internet. Indeed, it has effectively substituted the telephone as a major means of office communications. As well, it is, to a lesser extent, becoming a major mode of communication in keeping in touch with friends, family and everything in between.

To this effect, I have been using email as a means of communicating to my friends and workmates. Recently, because of the arcane and boring duties here at work that for sure does not contribute to my professional development, I have tried reaching out to potential departments at my workplace that might as well relate to my background and give me some interesting tasks for my remainding 30 days here in Geneva.

I communicated to them my request verbally at first which to my delight arrived to some kind of consensus and promises that by next week, I would expect some interesting tasks to be assigned to me. Good at least I have something to look forward to and not be bored for 8 hours starring at the calendar every morning counting the number of days I have left till my virtual alarm clock ticks away. Well, as they say, promises are meant to be broken and in true international bureaucratic fashion, all of the talk that we had just seem to be just a show.

With that, I tried using my email to somehow bombard them with follow-ups and inform that 'Oh yes, just so you know I am still here, alive and kicking.' And of course, there's also the magic telephone which into this day and age, has turned into a mailbox announcing in a glorious French and English greeting their abscence and their pseudo-willingness to return the call as soon as possible.

Days and week passed by with no reply. I've tried this and I've tried that and with all these attempts, I have definitely proven to myself that 'promises are meant to be broken.'

I have a theory: the more people use email, the more prone they are to anxiety and emotional stress and the more stress you have, the more email there will be. Sounds absurd? Let me explain.

Twenty milleniums ago, communication was simple. Utterances were usefully accomplished by non-verbal cues: tone of voice, facial expressions, or perhaps nudging your fellow hunter-gatherer in the ribs upon reaching a reaction.

Twenty years ago, communication was pretty much simplier. Much of it was still by phone - true there's no shoving, but intonation could help distinguish say wry irony from bitter resentment to genuine gratification. Plus, when you asked a question, the answer came rather in seconds leaving no time for calibrated response and manoeuvring, as opposed to minutes, hours, or as in the case of my significant emails, never.

Don't get me wrong. E-mail is great. It has vastly expanded my social horizons. When e-mail was still not on my horizon, I rarely spoke by phone to more than five people in a day -- airtimes back then are unaffordable and phone lines only for the select few. Now, my mailbox is actually bombarded with dozens of mails everyday. I have so many friends, albeit most of them are spammers!

But my many email friends also have many friends, and I'm just a single hay in the stack. So they can't really afford to treat me like one - you know, reliably acknowledging my existence, that sort of thing.

Inevitably, questions arise. Is Bob - who once answered e-mails promptly but has fallen silent - indignant? Or has my social status, in Bob's view, dropped so much, so I'm not quite worth the time?

There is actually a cure for this condition, chanting - It is the spam filter!

Serotonin is the chemical secreted by the brain that actually helps us handle social hierarchy. Respect and other forms of positive feedback elevate serotonin effectively raising self-esteem and leading to a sort of self-assurance conduct befitting a normal homo sapiens. Disrespect and disappointment can lower serotonin, opening oneself to self-doubt.

Self-doubt can be valuable when it is reality-based - if, say Bob is really mad at you, and self-doubts leads you to wonder why and to make amends. But the landscape of e-mail is full of noise and imagined signals. The waiting time can just induce paranoia.

The reasons that we've carved various means to communicate is a primal need to have human contact. Humans just deeply need it. If the deft use of e-mail makes each of us more successful, we may, one by one, amend the structure of ourselves until we are optimal e-mail animals.

Wait, I got 5 new messages in my inbox, need to answer them ASAP. Nah, just let them wait....