Electronic intimacy (no, not Skype-sex)

For the past year I have worked as a freelance writer and editor for a New York-based news site that tracks specific elements of the financial market. I have been able to work from New York, from California and from Madrid thanks to the internet and my "virtual commute" - I receive assignments from and submit articles to my boss electronically. I edit other people's articles from my own computer and re-upload them, I track various online journals and newspapers, I read press releases and statements hosted on "official" websites, I upload my own writing to the site. Hell, my entire position is based on the internet, and my point is that everything they pay me to do is online and mostly email-based. The pros and cons of this setup, which are legion, are a different train of thought entirely. What I realized recently, however, is that however much this "global age of instance electronic communication" is decried for its "depersonalization" of human interaction, converting real people into a seemingly infinite string of ones and zeros stored somewhere in the ether, it also lends a strange sense of intimacy when the sole method of daily communication between you and another person is email.

When you email back and forth with someone multiple times a day, you get to "know" them very well. I can tell, for example, when my boss emails me from his BlackBerry or from his laptop, which tells me where he is. I can tell if he's rushed or tired or distracted, or if he's more upbeat or relaxed. If I worked with him in person every day I would be able to detect these things too, and probably more - but my point is that frequent virtual communication does not preclude basic familiarity with someone else. What the internet does even better, though, is assign an unambiguous "date and time" to everything - the timestamp. I know, for example, at what time during the day my boss gets most of his work done. I also know that he often works until very late at night, because his emails announce themselves as "Sent at: 2:07 AM." And it goes both ways - this man knows my sleeping patterns better than anyone except maybe my roommates, because I email him in the mornings right when I wake up, and submit most of my work late at night right before I go to bed. Occasionally we have an email "conversation" - that strange phenomenon in which you both know the other is online, and email back and forth dozens of times, almost in real time - long after midnight. Who interacts with their bosses or employees so late? Well we do, now - and it's all marked and documented for us, thanks to the timestamp on all our emails.

Another example. A recurring assignment for one of my classes this semester is to post a question/response to our weekly reading assignment. A post is due every Sunday at noon - which means, naturally, that most people in the class either post Saturday night or Sunday morning (down to the wire, as it were). When you post (and how coherent/developed your questions are) is determined both by your personality and by your plans for the evening before the deadline. (Aside: the goal is to avoid the Saturday Night Dilemma, in which you get home late and wonder whether you would rather do this assignment drunk tonight, or hungover tomorrow morning.) Last weekend I posted a question at 1:45 AM on Saturday night - or, I suppose, Sunday morning. I thought I would be the only one, because who is so uncool that they're doing their linguistics homework on a Saturday night, when they should either be going out or sleeping it off? Well, I was wrong. In a class of eight people, three of us posted our questions between the hours of midnight and 2:30 AM, and someone even responded to my post. (This is, actually, more of a statement about the social proclivities of linguistics PhD candidates than anything else.) Either way, though, when something like that happens you feel solidarity but, again, an incongruous intimacy - because while the traditional adage told you it was rude to call someone after 9 PM, we're currently breaking down all the old assumptions and constraints against communicating with the world at large from our own homes, late at night.

Good, bad, awkward, normal - I don't know if it's none or all of these things. What I really want to know, though, is why my interactions with my boss have been "depersonalized" because I simply email him twelve times a day instead of working next to him in an office.