Wednesday, June 17, 1998

'E' is for 'eternity'

Now that it is almost impossible to call anybody, thanks to voice mail, e-mail is closing in on the telephone as the favored form of electronic communication between adults.

E-mails are easy and instantaneous, maybe too quick and easy. The speed means there's little time for reflection, or cooling off, and careless gossip and intemperate denunciations are dispatched with a click of the mouse.

Once concluded, phone conversations disappear into the ether, unless you're Prince Charles with a cell phone, conversing with Linda Tripp or in hot water with the feds, in which rare occurrence your conversation will reappear in embarrassing circumstances.

Not so with e-mails. E-mails are like cockroaches. They never completely go away; they're always around somewhere, lurking in the hard drive, skittering through the Internet or hiding in a backup disk. The Iran-Contra culprits thought they had deleted all their e-mails as thoroughly as they had shredded the paper documents, until the special prosecutor arrived with his electronic subpoena.

The Justice Department -- irony of ironies -- is using Microsoft chairman Bill Gates' own e-mails against him in its antitrust case. If Gates can't delete, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Before confiding an indiscretion via e-mail, remember the "e" in e-mail stands for eternal.