I'll get back to you

I haven't checked my email lately. And by "lately", I mean roughly 12 hours. I feel a dual pull: the desire to put off other important work by checking my email, i.e. the desire for immediately gratifying distracting novelty stimuli, and the worry that I may be missing something important, i.e. the desire to be responsible. To neglect one's email is to deprive both one's short-term and long-term desires. That's how I feel, but how do the people on the other end of those emails waiting in my inbox feel? How long do you have to wait to be considered neglectful?

Email, like texting, is an asynchronous form of communication. With any asynchronous form of communication, there is no obvious answer to the question above. These two ways of communicating have vastly different norms as to how long one can wait to reply without seeming rude. In fact, I would argue that email does not really have a norm, and that lack of a norm may cause some animosity toward the person with whom the email user is communicating as well as animosity toward the medium of email.

Thinking about how long is an acceptable gap between message-received and message-reply prompts me to think about the power dynamic between the sender and the receiver. One may always hide behind the fig leaf of busyness ("sorry I didn't return your email sooner. I've been totally swamped!"), and certainly some emails take longer to reply to than others. Some require that you look up other information or do some work in order to craft an acceptable reply, and this may take time. In some cases (as in mine right now), the receivers may not be aware that he/she received any message, and thus can plead ignorance (for about 12 hours or so, right?). But in many cases, the receiver prioritizes. All other things be equal, the receiver puts the sender somewhere in a hierarchy. They can afford to put off answering a co-worker but not the boss, a brother but not a wife, etc. To be upset about not being replied to sooner is, sometimes, to be upset at one's place in another's social hierarchy. Because email is asynchronous and it lacks the norms about time-to-reply than texting has, it is ideal for exposing these hierarchies.

One interesting solution to this problem might be to develop a thorough email policy: you're guaranteed a reply within one week, barring vacation or illness. You get a reply in 48 hours (excluding vacations and illnesses) if the reply requires less than 5 minutes of work. Within work hours, you can expect a reply in 4 hours if the reply requires less than 5 minutes of work. If the reply requires more work, the amount of estimated time of work in minutes = the required reply time in hours (20 minutes of work = 20 hours to reply). No exceptions, regardless of whether you're my boss's boss's boss or my intern.

I'm sure people would think you're pretty weird for setting these rules, but norms have to start somewhere.

Is the internet speech or behavior?

In the debate about SOPA and PIPA, there are several assumptions worth examining. The first is that the content of the internet (by "content" I mean every bit of information conveyed via the internet) is "speech" in the same that "speech" was defined at the time that the Constitution was written, and therefore must not be subject to censorship. 

You can do more and more things with the internet each year. Hence, you can do more and more bad things with the internet. Eventually, people will be able to do so many bad things with the internet that in order to maintain any sense of economic or social stability, it will be impossible for governments to maintain a hands-off attitude toward regulating content. The scale of the havoc a malevolent person or group could create online will increase until, at some point, it will be greater than the amount of havoc that a person or group could create offline. We may not be there yet, but the more aspects of life move online, the closer we get to such a scenario.

If we consider the internet to be like speech, well then, we shouldn't restrict it in any way for fears of a new McCarthyist era, or worse. While the analogy of internet to speech is intuitive and made sense when the internet was little other than a replication of offline conversations and news, I think it makes less and less sense the more and more you can do on the internet. When you can engage in almost any activity online that you can engage in offline - commerce, relationships, etc. - then the internet becomes less like speech and more like an alternate social and commercial reality. If we consider the internet to be more like an alternate version of the offline world (or a microcosm of the offline world, complete with commerce, substantive relationships, etc.), then asking the law to stay out of online matters altogether in the name of free speech seems increasingly unworkable and inappropriate.

There's a larger philosophical point we will have to confront at some point: is the internet and all online interaction speech or behavior? Deciding what kinds of speech are okay is very neat and tidy: its pretty much all okay; speech is free. But behavior is not. Deciding what kinds of behavior lead to negative consequences - that is, what kinds of behavior are bad behavior - is very messy. Its an eternally unfinished project. But no one would ever claim that everyone is free to behave as they wish.

If a governing body is given the power to deem some online speech/behavior illegal and worthy of punishment, of course there will be the possibility that those in power could abuse their power and shut down sites not because the sites are doing something that most people would agree is wrong, but because it goes against the interests of those in power. But the same is true of law in the offline world: an authoritarian regime could seize power and enforce rules that are not in the best interest of the people. And yet we live within the law. We have a system of checks and balances in the offline world that, by and large, keep overwhelming corruption from happening.

So it seems increasingly unrealistic to have anything associated with internet content to be utterly and completely free from the rule of law, but clearly, there need to be checks and balances, and it seems as though this part of the plan of legislating online activity, at this stage, hasn't been thought out. Now would be a good time to start figuring out what such law would look like.