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Just sent off a proposal for a lunchtime discussion session at this year’s annual meeting of the “Society for Social Studies of Science”:http://www.4sonline.org/, and was struck by a small dilemma as I was composing an e-mail to the conference organizer – in short, I hesitated over my choice of which e-mail address I should use to send the message.

There are two main address that I use for correspondence, one ending in @epistemographer.com and the other ending in @gmu.edu. I tend to use them relatively interchangeably for day to day work correspondence, though I do tend to use the @epistemographer.com one for my personal life (not that work and personal life don’t tend to bleed into each other quite a bit). In composing the 4S e-mail tonight, I initially lingered over the “Account:” drop-down less for any deep, philosophical reason than for a simply technical one: the George Mason mailservers have been embarrassingly spotty recently, and mail sent to that address can take up to several hours to show up in my inbox.

However, after ticking off the @epistemographer.com address and pressing “send”, I realized something odd – I was the only one of my proposed co-panelists (cc:-ed on the e-mail) whose e-mail address wasn’t a university. I felt momentarily self-conscious, as if I were somehow going to be seen as an impostor, an interloper from outside who didn’t carry the same stature as a bona-fide credentialed professor. I remembered the stigma that an @aol.com address carried in many communities, and started thinking of how incredibly important an e-mail address is in general, but to academics in particular.

Think about it – the work we do is less defined by the particular institution for which we work than most other professions, yet our e-mail addresses (our dominant means of professional communication) tend to clearly identify us with a particular institution. If a lawyer or a CEO changes firms, her change in e-mail address makes perfect sense; she doesn’t need to maintain her old workplace identity, and in her professional life can wholly attach herself to her new employer’s name. For academics, however, the politics of e-mail addresses seem more murky – we’re less fee-for-service contract workers than free agents who happen to find shelter in one institutional home or another, and when we leave one institution for another (or for no institution at all), our main working identities may remain fundamentally unchanged. Unfortunately, the institutions might disagree, forcing us (especially those in the post-graduate-itinerant-scholar mode) to change our public “face” whether we like it or not.

The safest thing to do as an individual scholar seems to be to build up a set of structures that would allow you to maintain your identity independently of your particular institutional context. In a sense, I think this is what I’ve been unconsciously doing with my epistemographer.com domain and e-mail address…asserting more control over my public identity, and making sure that I have control over the public persona I’ve created (and its various names/addresses) no matter where my career happens to take me. At the same time, however, I’m wary that my carefully-constructed persona might be seen as somehow lacking, inferior to a more directly-credentialed public identity that would wear its university affiliation on its sleeve.

I’m thinking that one of the best pieces of advice I could give to a first-year graduate student would be to pick out and register a domain name that is professional yet unique, and start building it into an identity that is under nobody’s control but their own. It might well be the best $30 investment they’d ever make.

Comments 3 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.

Joe Grossberg,

May 2, 2005 at 10:56 am

Yeah, whatever your email address is … holla back at me. I have a great VCR-related insight / personal experience that could bolster your thesis.

Janet,

May 4, 2005 at 3:51 pm

Institutional email addresses are definitely important. I would suggest,though, using something to do with your name. We have the firstname@lastname.com in my family and that is at least professionally acceptable PLUS easier to remember to email each of us.
But yes. I remember my year as an ‘independent scholar’ and at least i was working at an institution that gave me business cards and an academic email address.

fortihacker,

March 11, 2006 at 8:41 pm

email:ca920105@gmail.com
I just like spam! I’m collocting junk email…

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