Companies are monitoring jokes and e-mail sent to and from your home as well as work, snooping thanks to company servers. The most common justification for Internet and e-mail monitoring which is now reported by Professor Rosen in the workplace is purported fear of liability under perceptions of sexual harassment laws, which require companies to protect workers from speech that might be construed to create a hostile or offensive working environment. Insurance company representatives who peddle mutual funds and other products bringing them within securities regulation are exposed to another contention why someone is assigned to open and read their mail. Letters lack the contextual accompaniments sound of voice, tone, gesture, facial expression that, in spoken conversation, are a source of clarification, Simmel argued, letters can be more easily misinterpreted than speech. With email, the possibilities for misinterpretation are even more acute.
Email combines the intimacy of the phone with the infinite retrievability of a letter.
And because email messages are often dashed off quickly, they may, when taken out of context, provide an inaccurate window onto someone s emotions. Professor Rosen mentioned an essay on privacy a hundred years ago by Louis D. Brandeis and Samuel Warren, who expressed worries that technologies, then the invention of instant photographs and the tabloid press, invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life. What troubled Brandeis and Warren was Boston s Saturday Evening Gazette which described a lavish breakfast party that Warren had put on for his daughter s wedding. The information was not salacious. Brandeis and Warren were appalled that a domestic ceremony would be described in a gossip column and then discussed by strangers.