I had an experience recently that really highlights the relationship between email and social identities. I met a guy at a business networking function (seattlemind.com), and we had an interesting conversation about the increasing use of semantic maps on the web. We exchanged business cards, and he sent me a link to an article related to our conversation via email, I sent him a related link, after which our conversation was over. It turns out, however, that we have some mutual friends here in Seattle. The next couple of times I meet him are through social events. I decide to invite him to party I am having, and without really thinking about it rather than just addressing an invitation to his work email I deliberately filtered through all of my personal emails assuming I would find his personal email on a cc list of one of our mutual friends: which I did. I dashed off an invitation to his personal email with my personal email.
When I realized what I had just done, I started thinking about what social faux pas I was unconsciously avoiding by going out of my way to find his personal email address. More importantly, what implicit social information was I communicating by emailing him from a personal email address rather than my work email address? Clearly, I considered us to have migrated from a working relationship/context to a friendship relationship/context, and felt the need to communicate to him through the appropriate channel. If I invited him to an event through our work emails, I felt he might draw the wrong conclusions about the nature of the event itself and whom was likely to be attending.
Does everyone retain such a strong distinction in their email identities between work and personal life? I then remembered a comment from my former manager Lili when I first handed out my new “work” email after leaving Microsoft. I created the new email account because I felt I needed to have a work email once I left Microsoft to help maintain my professional relationships. Lili said to me “but shelly, I want to be getting messages from your personal email account”. In other words, now that I had left Microsoft, she wanted to communicate as friends, not as former colleagues.
