The Tyranny of E-mail Read Online Free
Author: John Freeman
to identify a brand and its logo with particular traits we prize: Audi’s linked circles are the mark of engineering precision; Starbucks’ cup goddess is proof that a multinational coffee chain has bohemian roots.
When we are pummeled by ads, awash in representations of the world, is it any surprise that the real-world commons—a shared space in which people of all sorts can meet and interact— has been shunted aside for its electronic simulacra? Instead ofdriving down the road to our local bookstore, where we might actually talk to someone, we buy a book over Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com; rather than go into the bank, we check our balance from home; rather than buy the newspaper from a paperboy who comes to collect the monthly bill, we read it online, for free. These are all conveniences, significant ones for the busy, for people who live in remote locations, or for people for whom face-to-face conversation is inordinately stressful, but the upshot is that we spend less time dealing face-to-face with other human beings and more time before a machine.
Thirty years ago, in
The Society of the Spectacle
, the French philosopher Guy Debord predicted we would be spending more time apart. “The reigning economic system is founded on isolation,” he wrote. “At the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system, as it strives to reinforce the isolation of ‘the lonely crowd.’” To this list of machines we can now also add the Internet and e-mail.
Ironically, tools meant to connect us are enabling us to spend even more time apart.
The most glaring discovery of the Stanford University study mentioned earlier was not that people burned up two hours a day on the Internet but that those two hours came out of time they would normally spend with family and friends. Once that withdrawal has begun and technology has been identified as a way to connect, it’s a hard cycle to break. We blog, broadcast our vacations on YouTube, obsessively update the newsfeeds of our Facebook pages—“Today, Brian is feeling happy”
—
as if an experience, an emotion, a task completed hasn’t actually happened unless it has been recordedand shared with others. E-mail is the biggest, broadest highway on which this outward projection occurs. Why write a postcard about your trip to France to one friend when you can simply forward and copy the message to all your friends? Why tell a coworker you have performed an arduous piece of labor when you can cc several others and make sure they know it, too?
In the twenty-first century, writing and “publishing” have become easier than ever—and reading, due to the amount of material available to read and the rate at which we are communicating, has become harder than ever. This wouldn’t be quite so untenable an environment if we were actually seeing each other face-to-face. But the drop in face-to-face contact has taken this epistemological fracture and given it an emotional dimension. We have all the tools in the world, yet we’ve never felt more alone. By depriving ourselves of facial expressions and the tangible frisson of physical contact, we are facing a terrible loss of meaning in individual life. The difference between a smiley face and an actual smile is too large to calculate. Nothing—especially “lol”—can quite convey the sound of a friend’s laughter.
Talking Back
On a small scale, perhaps this model of frenzied communication would work. Think of a house in which six roommates share everything and anything and the closeness this fosters. But ironically, due to the networked, interlinked nature of the Internet and the way it grows virally, exponentially, this constant chatter is utterly unsustainable. The creeping tyranny of e-mail is a symptom of how out of control the situation
When we are pummeled by ads, awash in representations of the world, is it any surprise that the real-world commons—a shared space in which people of all sorts can meet and interact— has been shunted aside for its electronic simulacra? Instead ofdriving down the road to our local bookstore, where we might actually talk to someone, we buy a book over Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com; rather than go into the bank, we check our balance from home; rather than buy the newspaper from a paperboy who comes to collect the monthly bill, we read it online, for free. These are all conveniences, significant ones for the busy, for people who live in remote locations, or for people for whom face-to-face conversation is inordinately stressful, but the upshot is that we spend less time dealing face-to-face with other human beings and more time before a machine.
Thirty years ago, in
The Society of the Spectacle
, the French philosopher Guy Debord predicted we would be spending more time apart. “The reigning economic system is founded on isolation,” he wrote. “At the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system, from cars to televisions, also serve as weapons for that system, as it strives to reinforce the isolation of ‘the lonely crowd.’” To this list of machines we can now also add the Internet and e-mail.
Ironically, tools meant to connect us are enabling us to spend even more time apart.
The most glaring discovery of the Stanford University study mentioned earlier was not that people burned up two hours a day on the Internet but that those two hours came out of time they would normally spend with family and friends. Once that withdrawal has begun and technology has been identified as a way to connect, it’s a hard cycle to break. We blog, broadcast our vacations on YouTube, obsessively update the newsfeeds of our Facebook pages—“Today, Brian is feeling happy”
—
as if an experience, an emotion, a task completed hasn’t actually happened unless it has been recordedand shared with others. E-mail is the biggest, broadest highway on which this outward projection occurs. Why write a postcard about your trip to France to one friend when you can simply forward and copy the message to all your friends? Why tell a coworker you have performed an arduous piece of labor when you can cc several others and make sure they know it, too?
In the twenty-first century, writing and “publishing” have become easier than ever—and reading, due to the amount of material available to read and the rate at which we are communicating, has become harder than ever. This wouldn’t be quite so untenable an environment if we were actually seeing each other face-to-face. But the drop in face-to-face contact has taken this epistemological fracture and given it an emotional dimension. We have all the tools in the world, yet we’ve never felt more alone. By depriving ourselves of facial expressions and the tangible frisson of physical contact, we are facing a terrible loss of meaning in individual life. The difference between a smiley face and an actual smile is too large to calculate. Nothing—especially “lol”—can quite convey the sound of a friend’s laughter.
Talking Back
On a small scale, perhaps this model of frenzied communication would work. Think of a house in which six roommates share everything and anything and the closeness this fosters. But ironically, due to the networked, interlinked nature of the Internet and the way it grows virally, exponentially, this constant chatter is utterly unsustainable. The creeping tyranny of e-mail is a symptom of how out of control the situation
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