Merlin, I know that you receive exponentially more e-mail than I do, and I’m sure much of it comes from strangers like me. Which of course is the price of celebrity—fanmail is a long-standing phenomenon, as is the expectation of hearing back.

So I suspect that your experience with e-mail as it is today is atypical, especially compared to the Net-connected population at large. Also the experience of IT folks is atypical, as they receive so many requests for a specific type of help.

I think that instead of your language of sanity vs. insanity, I would use the terminology of “humanizing” vs. “dehumanizing,” which is much more common parlance for discussions of the social and psychological ramifications of technologies.

In many ways e-mail, like all mediating (or interface) technologies, has great potential to dehumanize people. The more mediated our contact with one another, the less human our interaction. It’s the same as with driving in a car—if I cut someone off, I can’t apologize to them, or explain how I was confused about the route I was taking. And if someone is driving at me with their fog lights unnecessarily blinding me, I can’t explain to them what’s bothering me. All we can do is gesture and honk and curse. All that glass and metal and noise and velocity between us dehumanizes the interaction.

E-mail can also be totally neutral, as it is when we make choices about how to communicate with people we don’t know or do not see in person. It is our choices about how to write the e-mail that decide if it will be a humanizing or dehumanizing interaction.

E-mail can also be humanizing, when it becomes the subject for discussion between human beings who are in relationship or in community with one another. When I talk with my boss about how we prefer to use e-mail (we like e-mailing notes rather than interrupting each other with minor things), that’s a very humanizing, relationship-building conversation, and the resulting habits also are humanizing because they improve how we work together.

So yes, e-mail can encourage us to act insane (i.e., to dehumanize ourselves and others). It can also be neutral, or it can encourage us to act sanely (i.e, to act more like full-fledged humans). I think the interesting questions ask why this particular technology is sometimes dehumanizing and sometimes humanizing. What makes the difference?