My Internet Alter Ego: Impersonation by E-mail

Electronic mail (e-mail) is a wonderful convenience. Messages usually arrive at their destination within 10 or 15 minutes, at no cost. The recipient can read them and reply at his or her convenience. For people who are online regularly, this permits several exchanges during a day. You avoid “telephone tag” or delays in postal mail (or “snail mail” as we Internet users call it). It is particularly handy for communication with people in other parts of the world. When my son, Ben, was in Perth, Australia, we corresponded regularly by e-mail, especially when we were co-authoring Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics. I also corresponded regularly with numerous people in Brazil while writing Fernando Henrique Cardoso: Reinventing Democracy in Brazil. Sometimes when I was puzzled by a Portuguese expression or reference, I could get a clarification from Brasilia in half-an-hour.

Sometimes the speed and ease of e-mail can be a disadvantage. One tends to ship off epistles on the spur of the moment, without taking time for reflection. One can get overly involved in someone else’s personal problems, as I did with my son when he was in Australia and New Zealand, without being able to get together to discuss things face-to-face. E-mail communication lacks the emotional resonance of a telephone conversation, let alone a personal meeting. The symbols “:-)” for happiness, “:-(“ for sadness, or “;-)” for a wink are a poor substitute for spoken communication.

On e-mail, you can’t always be sure that your correspondent really is who he or she claims to be. This fact is explicit in anonymous discussion groups, where people don’t use their real names. But impersonation can also be a problem. For example, I was quite surprised to find a message with the following header in my e-mail box last March:

Subject: The Future of Marxism
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 1999 13:17:20 PST
From: “Ted Goertzel”
To: … …

The letter was mailed to a number of people prominent in the Progressive Sociology Network (PSN), an e-mail mailing list that links Marxist sociologists around the world. A few years ago, I had been active on PSN, and had often provoked angry responses when I shared my disillusionment with Marxism. The letter read like something I might have written, but I did not. Several of the recipients, friends of mine from years ago, thought I must be going through a midlife crisis. I quickly e-mailed them to explain that the letter was not from me, and I contacted the security people at Hotmail who removed from the service. If I had taken the time to pursue it, I might have tracked down the sender; Hotmail could have easily found out which Internet Service Provider had sent the original message. But it didn’t seem worth the trouble to pursue it.

What, one might ask, was the sender’s motive in sending a message over my signature? In this case, I suspect he or she was considering “coming out” as an apostate from Marxism and wanted to test the waters anonymously. Sending the message to me assured that the deception would be discovered, which increased the likelihood it would attract attention. So far as I know, the sender has sent no more messages impersonating me. However, I mentioned the incident to my interdisciplinary class, The Internet and Society, and a few days later the following message appeared on the class bulletin board from “ted_goertzel”:

We will not have class on March 12, I was mistaken in the earlier post. Please follow the Web page topics for that day and do the required reading. We will resume classes after spring break. I also want to remind everyone that there is no class on Good Friday, but, again, there is a Web page for that day.

Again, a message that I might have sent, but I did not. The same message was sent to our class mailing list, which would have reached many more students more quickly. But I have the mailing list proctored so nothing can go out until I approve it with a password. I sent a corrective post

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to the bulletin board, so no harm was done. Again, I decided not to bother trying to track the perpetrator down, although Rutgers rules explicitly prohibit “impersonation.” Impersonation is easy to do; anyone can open an account on Hotmail or another free e-mail provider in any name they choose. There are few protections, although the letter to my class mailing list came with a warning from the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that it might be false.

Anonymity is a very important part of Internet discussions, although not all groups allow it. I could have set up a class bulletin board which required people to use their real names, but I decided to allow anonymous communication because it allows people to express feelings and ideas they might be too inhibited to express in face-to-face discussions, let alone in print over their signature. The bulletin board is a useful outlet for a large lecture class (250 students). It is disproportionately used by the discontented, including some students who seem emotionally unbalanced, but there is little harm in giving them an outlet. When they attack me unfairly, other students generally come to my defense. Using a mailing list, which automatically sends e-mail to everyone’s box, for this purpose is not such a good idea, however. People quickly complain about getting so much mail from a few malcontents.

The Internet attracts many people who otherwise have a hard time finding an audience for their preoccupations. In the case of the Marxist sociologists, it provides support to people who otherwise find it difficult to get anyone to take their ideology seriously. I am sure this is true for other eccentric groups as well, and it may increase the tendency for people with unusual beliefs to isolate themselves from society at large.

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