To be sure, it saves a great deal of time and paperwork, and has facilitated new, unimagined forms of affinity. However, email is also a thief. It steals our time, and our privacy. It deceives us into thinking we have endless additional hours in the day to engage in far-flung communications that we may or may not need or want. All of a sudden, on top of everything else we have to do, email is one more garden demanding tending.
Email brings a kind of pseudo-urgency that demands an instant response.
It creates false intimacies. Recently, I got an email message from a perfect stranger, a student who had read one of my articles and who wanted help on a term paper. I was touched, but alas, there aren't enough hours in the day. Yet something about the message made me feel I needed to apologize for not being able to do her homework. With email, it's too easy to hit the reply key, with results you may regret.