Geoff Pullum on the Lingua Franca blog today, in a posting entitled “Away from one’s desk”, about vacation messages:
Ages ago, when e-mail was young and did not yet dominate our lives, and vacation response was not a built-in feature of mailers, and the Berkeley Unix /usr/bin/vacation had not been written, a friend of mine at Stanford (the linguist Arnold Zwicky) had a little vacation-response script written for him in the Bourne shell language by a computer staff person (it was remarkable how little code it took), and he chose a first-person message. Immediately people started replying to the script: “I know you say you’re away, Arnold, but if you could just take a minute to look at this … “: They could not grasp the idea that a shell script had mailed them. The innate human tendency to perceive agency was too strong. If it said “I am away,” they thought that was Arnold talking.
So I always use the third person.
People are very much inclined to treat computer programs and their products as the work of sentient beings, a fact demonstrated many years ago in the way people interacted with the ELIZA program.
In this case, I continued to use the first person (because I was uncomfortable splitting myself into two entities), but added a note saying that the message was coming to you from a program, not a person. and that it was pointless to reply to it. That seems to have worked.
