Wrong Email Address

Today I had the experience of receiving an email intended for someone else. This is not the first one, but it does rank as the one with the most amount of personal information. It was quite the email, long, personal, intimate even, I felt voyeuristic just reading it. It occurred to me this is something entirely new for the digital age. Now that txting / email / IM are the preferred methods of communication you have the potential of informing complete strangers about rashes, visas, and college football games (some of these were in said email - I will leave it to your imagination). Its as if you call the wrong number and blurt the entire conversation before you even know whose on the other end.

Reminds me of my days as an email administrator. There were certain instances when I would have to look through the mail "queue" to find messages that were blocking the flow of email (think of it as a digital equivalent of a plumber). Certain messages were "malformed" and you would have to delete them, but in the middle of looking for those messages you would open a message that wasn't technically malformed, but the sender certainly was. Shessh the stuff people put in email, didn't they know I was reading it?

I started thinking about what our preferred methods of communication meant about our society. It seems to me that conversation is preferred going one way. Email, txt, voicemail, even blogs are communication that are sent without acknowledgement. Something has been lost there. It seems even those communications are less than the hand-written communication of past years, there is a richness missing. Reading some of the old letters from my Granny I have the sense of hearing a conversational voice from the past, reaching out, and waiting for a response back.

Maybe humans have always been in the process of loosing what was before.