Incognito

Google recently added Google Talk to its services and unlike their other launches, there was no long-awaited invitation of exclusive membership. Google Talk just appeared in the left nav of Gmail one day. I didn't even realize I had it until a friend of mine who also uses Gmail and happens to be in my address book sent me a message.

I haven't had any problems with it and am always eager to try the latest Gwhatever, so I didn't think twice about it, until I was discussing it with a friend. The new Google Talk/Gmail poses this problem: when you log on to Gmail, you're automatically logged into Google Talk, unless you specify otherwise. This means that anyone who also uses Gmail knows when your accessing your email.

So any emails that you've been delayed in responding to, or are flat-out refusing to respond to, can come back to haunt you. A simple, "I've been soo busy I haven't even had time to check my personal email!" wont' do. It makes those little white lies that are often necessary to balancing life priorities and needy friends complicated.

I realize that in a perfect world, we would always be honest and simply say: "I haven't had time to reply." or "I wanted to make you wait a few days for my response." or even "I wish I never met you or given you my email address." But, in reality, there is a need to occasionally "hide" from each other and technology should allow for that.

This has always been a problem for me with AIM. I'm a terribly chatty person, but even I sometimes need to buckle down and get to work. As it stands, I can be invisible to my entire buddy list, but it would be great if on a particularly busy day, I could hide from my friends list, but remain available to co-workers.

A former co-worker always keeps his AIM on "Away" so he can be selective in responding and still spare feelings. Theoretically, this is a good idea, but there's always that lingering, is this person really away or just ignoring my message?

And what about people who are in your proximity, see that you're at your computer, and know that you're not really "away" regardless of what your message says? Maybe you just need to chat with people you're working with on a particular project, and don't have time to flirt with that guy from media?

I don't advocate that technology should be an enabler of less than perfect aspects of human interaction, but the dynamics in communication are not quite so straightforward as technology sometimes allows.