This book is the culmination of nine years of research and experience on the
Internet. I first began to use email at the Hebrew University in the summer of
1991. Sensing that there are distinctive aspects to this new form of letterwriting,
for a while I kept a journal of my observations on the language of
email and the experience of using it. I had had an interest in letters and letterwriting
from the early days of my Ph.D. dissertation in sociology at the University
of Chicago, an analysis of letters to the Israel customs authorities. Then,
however, the focus was on issues of substance, not the form of letters