The geography of email
I have multiple email accounts, as I assume most people nowadays do. Some of these I associate with some sort of physical location, like my work email. Although I can access it from anywhere I please, it happens that read it most often when I am in a particular location (my office). My school-provided email, on the other hand, I access from a variety of locations, and do not attach a particular locality to it (though if I had to pick, it would be either wherever my current home is, or perhaps the school campus). And I have no particular associations with my purely web-based email accounts, like gmail.
The other day I received a message on my school account asking when I would be at work. The sender wished to retrieve some items from my office, but she did not have access to the floor that I work on. I read this on my word computer from the web interface to my school account, and replied through the same. A problem confronted me as I went to indicate when I would be at work. First, the original query (paraphrasing):
There are some things that I need to look at your work office. Are you around tomorrow or the next day after around noon to let me into ACME so I can look at things?
Note the naming of my place of employment. Now, my reply:
Yes. Tomorrow I will be there until late, and the next day will be there from [...]
I had some serious issues when I got to there in my message. For whatever reason, I didn’t want to rename the place where I work, wanting instead to use a deictic. Well, as I typed the message, I was sitting in my office, so it should have been “here” (especially since the relevant event, i.e., letting her in, would also be taking place with both of us “here”). But this was troubling, because I was typing from my school account, which I do not associate with work (though it has no strong associations with other locations, it is definitely negatively associated with work, pushed out my explicitly work-related account). So I viewed this communication as taking place in some space outside of my office, and the building containing it. So I went with “there”, instead, essentially taking my interlocutor’s viewpoint (or at least her perceived viewpoint; this is complicated by the fact that she may not have been aware of my work address).
Somehow I don’t think this issue would have come up if this were a telephone conversation, even if (for instance) I had received a call on my (non-existent) work-provided cell phone. The use of deictics would have been a function of my actual location. As it was, though, somehow the medium of communication influenced me enough to make me unsure of what word to use. Hmm, perhaps a folk theory of accessibility to email accounts (”you can only access xyz@abc.com when you are ‘located’ at abc”).