126 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
with each other to ‘call me back’); on the other hand, if an im-
mediate response is essential, and face-to-face communication is
impossible, you cannot beat the telephone. E-mail is better than the
letter in obtaining a quick response to an enquiry; but not for every
kind of message. There is a widespread feeling that letters are better
than e-mails for expressing negative content, such as breaking off
a relationship or reporting a family death, and that telephone or
face-to-face conversation is also better in such cases, where the full
range of vocal nuance is needed to do justice to the meaning. On the
other hand, it has been noted that people have a greater tendency
to self-disclose on the computer, compared with telephone and
face-to-face conversation – a factor which, some think, partly ac-
counts for the growth in e-romances.^35 E-mail has also emerged as
a means of communication where nothing was easily available be-
fore – such as between professionals whose erratic life-style meant
that they were never predictably at the end of a telephone line, be-
tween parents and their children at university, or between partners
separated by distance, for whom the cheapness of the medium is a
godsend.
E-mailhascometobeusedforsomeofthepurposestraditionally
carried out by the letter (e.g. the sending of CVs or job applications,
certain types of form-filling), but it has not yet supplanted conven-
tional mail for others (e.g. contractual matters), because of issues
to do with privacy, security, and legal tradition. While we may make
copies of a will, or of our house deeds, the ‘real’ documents have
a special status which it will be difficult, perhaps impossible, for
e-mail to replicate. Certainly, at present, the incompatibilities be-
tween software systems (mentioned above) disallow any privileged
status for a document where layout is critical, such as a legal docu-
ment or a commercial advertisement. The limitations of e-mail, as
a communicative medium, are in fact still being discovered. There
is no way of controlling an e-mail, once it has been sent; nor is
(^35) See the discussion in Wallace (1999: 151). Baron (2000: 235) suggests that the private
nature of e-mail dialogue accounts for its ‘laissez-faire’ character, so that it can be used
for virtually any subject-matter. Her illustrations include condolences, which for me
oversteps a boundary.