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Ok… here’s an idea that I wish I had come up with.  If you say yes to any of these questions, you may be an E-mailoholic…

1. Do you constantly sit by your computer hitting the send/receive button?

2.  Do you respond INSTANTLY to e-mails once their in your Inbox?

3.  Do you carry a PDA, Blackberry, Email capabable cell phone AND a laptop everywhere you go?

4.  Do you Instant message WHILE you check E-mail?

 Ok… then you might have a slight problem that Marsha Egan can solve with her new 12 step Email addiction program.  Take a look at the 12 steps at CNN.com

Curing E-mail addiction

If you don’t have time to read, why not have the book come to you.  Dailylit.com is a neat web site where you can sign up for emails daily, three times a week or weekdays.  Whatever schedule you choose, Dailylit.com will send you a fragment of a classic book.  Right now I’m reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.  It comes in 237 fragments.  So, however busy you really are in life, take a moment to read your email.  You can’t go wrong by stopping your day to read a good book.  Oh and the nice thing about their emails, they are advertisment free.

The New York Times reports that text messaging is our new shorthand. For example, when I write “brb” in my instant messenger it means–”be right back.” Or if I type text message using my cell phone, which I hate doing, I always substitute “u” for “you.” or “r” for “are.” OR for laughing I automatically use “lol.” It’s become second nature for me to text message using shorthand.

The Pleasures of the Text
By CHARLES McGRATH

As with any language, efficiency isn’t everything. There’s also the issue of style. Among inventive users, and younger ones especially, text-messaging has taken on many of the characteristics of hip-hop, with so much of which it conveniently overlaps - in the substitution of “z” for “s,” for example, “a,” for “er” and “d” for “th.” Like hip-hop, text-messaging is what the scholars call “performative”; it’s writing that aspires to the condition of speech. And sometimes when it makes abundant use of emoticons, it strives not for clarity so much as a kind of rebus-like cleverness, in which showing off is part of the point. A text-message version of “Paradise Lost” - or of the prologue, anyway - that tries for a little more shnizzle might go like this: “Sing hvnly mewz dat on d :X mtntp inspyrd dat shephrd hu 1st tot d chozn seed in d begnin hw d hvn n erth @{rcub};– outa chaos.”

A new law protects you from annoying anonymous emails and online comments.

Annoying Online Posts Could Be Illegal

Writing annoying, anonymous online posts or e-mails could land you in jail for as long as two years. That’s according to the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005, which was signed into law last week.

According to a section of the act, anyone who uses the Internet anonymously “with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another person” can be tried for violating federal telecommunications law and face fines or jail.

Dateline has a great story about sexual predators on the Internet. Reporter Chris Hansen does a great job on setting up a sting operation. It was interesting to watch… here’s the online story.

Catching potential Internet sex predators

In any home where there are kids with computers, there are parents with concerns. Teenagers can spend hours chatting online, but who are they chatting with? On the other end of that instant message could be a complete stranger — or a sexual predator. It’s a dangerous side of the Internet, one that’s growing and many children are at risk. So we went undercover, filling a house with hidden cameras.

The Internet is a haven for sexual predators. I believe both teenagers and adults can become victims. No matter who you are, chatting can be a dangerous way of meeting someone. If people have more than 50+ chat friends, and they chat about sex with most all of them, I would guess, that person has an addiction.

Interesting article from the NYTimes.com:

Parents Fret That Dialing Up Interferes With Growing Up

A report on teenagers and technology released this summer by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that teenagers’ use of computers has increased significantly. More than half of teenage Internet users go online daily, up from 42 percent in 2000, the report said; 81 percent of those users play video games, up from 52 percent.

Instant messaging has become “the digital communication backbone of teens’ daily lives,” used by 75 percent of online teenagers, according to the Pew report. “Parents are really struggling with this,” said David Walsh, the president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, a nonprofit educational organization in Minneapolis that began a program this year to help families reduce screen time and increase physical activity. “As the gadgets keep evolving, they keep consuming more and more of our kids’ time. Our kids need a balanced diet of activity, and the problem is that it’s getting out of balance. I don’t think as a society we’re dealing with it yet.”

Court Rules Spouse Can Seek Divorce For Erotic Online Chats

September 29, 2005 12:31 p.m. EST

Niladri Sekhar Nath - All Headline News Foreign Correspondent

Brussels, Belgium (AHN) – A recent ruling in Belgium allows a spouse to file for divorce on the grounds of erotic chats with a virtual partner over the Internet.

Belgian legal publication De Juristenkrant says the Brussels Appeals Court ruled transcripts of the erotic chatroom conversation can be regarded as a proof of “grossly insulting behavior” and provide sufficient grounds to file for divorce.

The court ruled, however, the erotic chatroom conversation does not serve as proof of adultery.

I personally have a box of letters that I have saved ever since I was a little girl. I have letters from family members I will cherish forever. But now, as e-mail is the prevalent way I correspond now, should I save these letters as if I recieved them in the mail.

The art of letter writing is becoming a lost art. We are a society of convience. E-mails are instantaneous. We can respond to invites, questions and I miss you’s instantly. The anxious wait by the traditional mailbox by the curve has been taken over by the sound of “You’ve Got Mail.”

At least, e-mail leaves a trace of correspondence unlike a quick cellphone call.

The NYTimes.com reports that people are corresponding more by e-mail, but they are not saving these traces of literary history. This is a problem between professional writers and their editors. How many great writers have collections of their personal correspondence, Ronald Reagan, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad and the list goes on and on. For example, Robert Lowell’s correspondence:

Book chat or no, great letters are great literature. In Robert Lowell’s letters, for instance, the mundane quickly opens up into whole worlds of feeling. ”I think our letters on the agency tax-money must have crossed,” Lowell wrote Elizabeth Hardwick, his soon-to-be ex-wife, in 1971. ”Through long hours of revising, a leisurely bath and a quick dressing, I have been thinking about our long past,” he continued. ”Not having you is like learning to walk.” Some entire books don’t convey as much raw emotion as those eight words do .

Designed for constant contact, e-mail messages inevitably have a different tone from postmarked missives that allow correspondents the time to ruminate and percolate, to apply a critical eye to their own lives. Often less nuanced, more prosaic, written in haste and subject to misunderstandings, e-mailed thoughts are microwaved, not braised. ”It often occurs to me that e-mail may render a certain kind of literary biography all but obsolete,” Blake Bailey, the author of a biography of Richard Yates and a forthcoming one of John Cheever, said. The messages are ”too ephemeral: people write them in a rush without the sort of precision and feeling that went into the traditional (and now utterly defunct) letter.”

It will be a daunting task to sift through the electronic archives of writers. Our art of literary greatness has subsided I believe through the quick e-mail. Misspellings, grammatical errors and the use of no punctuation plagues the e-mail system. If you’re a famous author or not, for the sake of prosperity and historical records, save and print those e-mails that touch your heart as if you walked to your mailbox and opened that letter from someone you waited so long to hear from.

Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace

Teenagers, according to the Pew Interent and American Life project, like instant messaging to e-mail.

And who says the Internet is male dominated… The survey found that girls 15-17 are power users.

Teens spurn e-mail for messaging

WHAT TEENS DO ONLINE
Send or read e-mail: 89%
Visit websites about TV, music or sport stars: 84%
Play online games: 81%
Online news: 76%
Send or receive instant messages: 75%

This is interesting, forwarding emails helps to keep social ties intact. So, don’t be so judgemental when your friends and family send you such silly forwards (Even if you KNOW they are not true).

Click Fraud and Halli-Bloggers - New York Times

Benjamin Gross, a doctoral student in library and information science at the University of Illinois, has studied e-mail forwarding behavior through informal interviews. Mr. Gross, according to a report on the Web site of New Scientist magazine, “says forwarding e-mails plays a vital role in constructing and maintaining modern social ties, despite the phenomenon receiving scant attention from social scientists.”