NYTimes - In Lost E-Mail, a Dividend

Eno zanimivo razmišljanje o tem, kako doživlja uporabnik izgubo e-mailov zadnjih nekaj let. Kar je hecno in po moje resnično, je pravzaprav olajšanje ob odrešitvi od navlake. Čeprav je to samo del zgodbe:

In Lost E-Mail, a Dividend

By CONSTANCE ROSENBLUM

It took me a few minutes to realize that everything was not all right.

I had come back from lunch a little late, feeling a little guilty, and when I sat down at my desk and idly began pulling up the half-dozen e- mail messages that had arrived in my absence, it almost didn't register that all the messages were corrupted. As an editor, I get a lot of unsolicited e-mail from journalism students, and you never know what will come your way. Even when it dawned on me that all the messages were corrupted in exactly the same way ? a few words of original text followed by an endless expanse of babbling, as if the message had had a stroke and become instantly incoherent ? I didn't grasp the magnitude of what had happened.

Then I did.

Frantically, I started scrolling back, then back further. Finally, I realized that in the two hours I had been away from my desk, three years of saved e-mail messages had either disintegrated into babble or disappeared altogether. A chunk of my life had floated away before my eyes.

Numb, I called the tech people, and soon, a little knot of specialists were clustered like brain surgeons around my machine. As in any good medical drama, which this would increasingly come to resemble, the experts shook their heads and looked grim.

"This can happen," one of them said. "Not every day, but it happens." The experts puttered and poked, looking for a hidden corner where ghost images of the lost messages might still be flickering. But basically, there was nothing they could do.

Later that afternoon, a several- hours-long checkup revealed that despite the antivirus software I clicked on so religiously every morning, my computer had been infected with no fewer than five viruses. I felt like a grieving relative in a hospital melodrama, learning that the patient was not only dead but had also died of a particularly disgusting disease.

Weeks later, I was still trying to put into words why this had been such a quietly devastating experience, still trying to find the proper metaphor.

Partly, the impact had to do with the suddenness with which a piece of your world disappears. Partly, too, it's the haziness of the impact. Not only do I have no idea what happened, I also have no clear idea what I lost. Though I'm not a compulsive saver of e-mail, when I tried to remember what I had in my machine, my mind went blank. When you lose a purse or a briefcase, you remember in sickening detail the exact contents ? credit cards, license, checkbook, keys ? and you immediately swing into action with the bank, the locksmith, the motor vehicles bureau. But here, just what was it I had deemed so worth hanging onto? I really couldn't say.

Then there was the question of culpability. Was it something I did? Something someone else did? Neither, the tech people assured me. It wasn't a failure to check for viruses or to back up files. I hadn't inadvertently hit a wrong key or issued a wrong command. "Viruses can lurk below the surface and lie dormant," one of the technicians told me in a "Twilight Zone" tone of voice. There were none of the usual scoldings or admonitions.

Eventually, I got a grip on myself and stopped giving unsolicited blow- by-blow accounts of that awful, surreal afternoon. The other day, when yet another technician ? neurosurgeon? ? stopped by to take a final look at the corpse and miraculously retrieved some random messages I'd deleted years ago, I was grateful but a little dismayed. Some of those retrieved messages had been killed seconds after arriving, relics of dreadful editing experiences whose remains couldn't be swept away too soon. It occurred to me: maybe recapturing what you lost isn't always such a great idea.

But I was still baffled by the intensity of the psychological aftershocks, and even more than I wanted my old messages, I wanted someone to bring clarity to my feelings. Sherry Turkle turned out to be that person.

Dr. Turkle, the founder and director of the new M.I.T. Initiative on Technology and Self and the author of "The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit" and "Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet," is an authority on the relationship between the machine and the psyche. And it is because that relationship is so nuanced and complex, she suggests, that the loss of computer data like e-mail can have such deep emotional impact.

"People experience the computer as an extension of the self," Dr. Turkle pointed out. "It's an intimate machine, a mind machine. In a sense, you are your computer.

"We experience the data in the computer as durable, almost tangible. But when you lose your data, as you did, you realize that it is no more than where a bit, an electron, is sitting for a moment in time. And as a result of the loss, your own sense of fragility is enhanced."

Dr. Turkle also helped clarify the oddest aspect of the experience. As much as I fretted and complained about my mishap, there was something extraordinarily cleansing about the whole episode. If I wasn't sure what I lost, if I barely remembered what I had, perhaps I never needed it in the first place ? then, now, ever. Even today, two months later, no one has called to complain about something that slipped through the cracks. It's as if the string to a child's balloon had been snipped, and the balloon, liberated from its moorings, went floating off into the sky. I felt untethered, in a Zen-like state.

Unexpectedly I was reminded of an observation made a few years ago after fire and floods devastated Grand Forks, N.D. "Fire washes away all that is nonessential," Michael Maidenberg, publisher of The Grand Forks Herald, said in a speech to aspiring journalists about his newspaper's response to the crisis. "Flames burn away all that is superficial."

After the loss of my e-mail, his words came back to me. On the surface, the association seemed disproportionate, even tasteless. Yet when I quoted the words to people who had had experiences similar to mine, they had an unexpected resonance.

Perhaps there is such a thing as too much e-mail, and too much of the pressure, not to mention the guilt, that goes with it.

Dr. Turkle said that in her research on people's relationship with computation, she hears more and more about a fantasy she calls "e- mail bankruptcy," a fantasy that she sometimes shares.

"In my case," she said, "when I feel that `doing my e-mail' is taking me away from the people and the work that I care about, I might declare bankruptcy." The senders of the thousand or so pieces of e-mail in her In basket would receive an automatic message saying something like: "Thank you for your message. Unfortunately, my unread mail has become too numerous for me to process and much of it may by now be out of date. I will not be replying to any of my current messages. If you still need to contact me, please send a new message."

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