Transparent? I guess I feel like things have become mysterious to me that didn't used to be. People, mostly, but also history inasmuch as it (like Soylent Green) is made of people.

Email, though, I agree about. Increasingly I feel like we need two different channels of communication to handle what happens over email: one for daily administrative nonsense, meeting reminders, invitations, and notes from students on one channel, and infrequent significant long messages from friends and family on the other. Maybe I need two addresses (and a third, as we all have now, for spam-catching). Getting deluged in junk email has bled some of the personal weight from it, though I still do exchange real letters over the ill-advised medium (I generally still like paper better for that).