As I unsubscribe from the ninth email in three days urging me to “refinance now!” if I don’t want to miss a “special rate!”, I curse my email doppelgänger. She’s landed us on a marketing database again and now I’m being inundated with spam.
My email doppelgänger is the person whose emails I receive in error, presumably due to an extra vowel or missing dash. I don’t know if she’s actually a “she”, but I’ve constructed an identity for her from the bits and pieces I think I’ve gleaned: female, teacher, resides in the US.
Despite the spam, I’ve become quite fond of my email doppelgänger, who is generally an inoffensive character.
This feeling is just another example of the kind of one-sided parasocial relationship that is so ubiquitous in this era of mass media and digital communication. These people are strangers to us, but through small glimpses of their lives we feel as if they’re not.
That’s due to a media psychology phenomenon called the media equation, according to Elizabeth Cohen, an assistant professor of communication studies at West Virginia University.
“We tend to process things socially, even if they’re not really social,” Cohen says. “So, for instance, we act polite and considerate to machines such as computers and cars, even though we know they aren’t human.
“We also empathise with celebrities even though we’ve never met them before, and we grieve for fictional characters even though they’re not even real. This occurs because we are, as a matter of human nature, hardwired to be social.”
Not everyone is so lucky when it comes to their email doppelgänger. Take Katie*, who, as an early Gmail adopter with a very common name, has dozens of them.
There’s Katerina in New York who didn’t show up for her second Covid vaccine, Ashley in Texas who owes her chiropractor $3,000, and the one who has a friend in North Carolina who likes to send photos of hamburgers.
Katie has been getting these emails for years and admits they can be a drag.
“It reaches a point where it’s so absurd,” she says. “I got caught up in this email thread of a kid’s soccer team … and they were fighting over who was picking up who from soccer practice. That one was probably the worst.”
There was also the woman who bought a Nissan Pathfinder in Las Vegas. “I was getting reminders for her to service her vehicle. I felt kind of bad for her because I wondered if she just couldn’t afford it,” Katie says.
This makes me think of the kind of narrative you might construct about a stranger passing in the street. There is something innately fascinating about catching a glimpse into someone else’s world and imagining what their life is like.
In the online world, we are constantly surrounded by a kind of digital version of people-watching, only instead of a particular attitude or sense of style, we read people through their digital ephemera: what they subscribe to, where they live, or their travel and eating habits.
“In digital media environments, there’s often not a lot of identity cues that you can gather about other people, compared to face-to-face communication at least, so the cues that you do get carry a lot of weight,” Cohen says.
“When you get a small little snapshot of somebody’s life – somebody who shares something similar to you, like a name, by getting a misaddressed email – it’s pretty intriguing. It might not be much knowledge, but it kind of feels like an intimate knowledge because it’s personal.”
So what do you about these people?
Perhaps the ultimate response to an online doppelgänger was that of Josh Swain of Tucson, Arizona. In April 2020, Swain created a Facebook Messenger chat of all the Josh Swains he could find on the platform and challenged them to fight for the right to use their common name.
there can only be one pic.twitter.com/VPamxjJ0yL
— joshua swain (@joshswainaz) April 24, 2020
“Precisely, 4/24/2021, 12:00 PM, meet at these coordinates, (40.8223286°N 96.7982002°W) we fight, whoever wins gets to keep the name, everyone else has to change their name, you have a year to prepare, good luck,” Swain wrote.
A year later, hundreds of people named Josh turned up at Air Park in Lincoln, Nebraska. Five-year-old Joshua Vinson Jr was crowned the winner of a pool-noodle competition open to anyone with the first name of Josh, while the original Josh Swain from Tucson won the right to keep his name via a heated game of rock, paper, scissors with Josh Swain from Omaha.
Of course, if you don’t have the energy to organise a mass pool noodle fight, there are other ways to make the best of things.
Katie once signed into the Hulu account of one of her doppelgängers, watched a few movies listed in the premium subscription and logged out – but not before changing the password in a bid to alert the user to their error.
Another time, when she was really fed up, she had the confirmation of a restaurant reservation go to her account. “I was like: ‘Why did you make a reservation during Covid?’ And so I cancelled the reservation. I felt terrible, but you know it was the height of Covid and I was like, ‘Don’t be going’.”
Without these juicy options in the case of my own doppelgänger, I’ll have to content myself with the judicious use of the delete button for now.
Katie preferred not to reveal her full name or Twitter handle, perhaps to avoid further doppelgängers
