After the wake of the "I love you" bug (whose subject line should've put everybody on their guard), it only seems like good health practice to examine the etiquette surrounding e-mail. For most people, after all, e-mail is an addiction as real as sugar, coffee, gin, sex, what have you. Most people can't face the workday without an early-morning hit that takes them to their inbox; and can't go to bed without knowing their messages are checked.

Being connected that tightly to your mail has to do weird things to your relationship with the rest of the world. There will be long-term effects for e-mail junkies that we can now only e-magine.

The dot.com industry has already altered the way people do business. Techies go to work in cargo pants and orange sweatshirts (with matching beanies), and don't get home till days later, thanks to bunkbeds installed over their desks. That wardrobe alone would pose an impediment to a normal social life; but add the time factor, and you've got a frightening proportion of today's 20-somethings maintaining their friendships mainly via the internet. So how will they do it?

Hopefully, not by exchanging forwards. The internet has invented shorthand for people who can't convey sympathy (L ); for those who don't know how to convey irony (J ); and for those who have nothing to convey (forwards, dahling, forwards). Now -- let's be honest -- most people are, and have historically been, limited in terms of imagination; but these new internet conventions make it way too easy for your average citizen -- or your average friend -- to sound like a moron.

It's ironic, considering the internet started as an inter-academic device that only smart people like professors used in order to keep in touch. Back then, e-mailers stared into dark screens and warmed their hands by radiators to type in obscure commands that sent their messages across vast distances. So surprisingly little has changed, really. Only now, we expect our inboxes to contain tokens of friendship rather than merely lab results. How will this affect our relationships with real people? Will e-friends take precedence over real friends simply because they have that charming way of disappearing once you Send your Reply? The internet is still a handy tool for experimentation -- except now, we're the lab rats.