The Tyranny of E-mail Read Online Free Page A

has become and it is onlygoing to get worse as more and more people around the world get broadband and e-mail accounts, and multinational companies, which rely on workers in different parts of the globe staying in touch, expand and put down even larger global footprints in the real world, not to mention in the cloud of machines connected to the Internet. We are at the beginning, not the end, of this problem.
    The tyranny of e-mail has also entered a feedback cycle that makes it ever harder to reflect on how bad the situation has become. Spending our days communicating through this medium, which by virtue of its sheer volume forces us to talk in short bursts, we are slowly eroding our ability to explain—in a careful, complex way—why it is so wrong for us and to complain, resist, or redesign our workdays so that they are manageable. This book is an attempt to slow things down for a moment so we can look at the enormous shift in time and space e-mail has effected, how e-mail has changed our lives, our culture and workplace, our psychological well-being. No one can predict the future of a technology, and this book is certainly not going to try, but it is essential, especially when that technology has become as prevalent and pervasive as e-mail, to examine its effects and assumptions and make an attempt to understand it in a broader context.
    We are evidently remaking our environment, so it’s fair to ask: What does this new world look like? What are its roots? How does the technology upon which it runs affect what we can say or how we say it? Should we have a correspondence list in the thousands? Does this way of living seem natural or even sustainable? Surrounded by the plastics, polystyrenes, and chemicals of the modern workplace, our bodies have an instinctual memory of something more natural. This metaphysical nostalgia, which Alan Weisman beautifully describes in
The World Without Us
, is a source of profound anxiety, and not the kind that can be medicated or wrested into submission. Speed cannot mask thisanxiety, either; it only destroys our ability to reconnect with something actual.
    Ever since humans emerged from Plato’s cave, we have tried to communicate with each other. Sounds turned into pictures, which turned into phonetics, which were eventually written down and codified, printed on clay, then parchment, then on paper. Mail has existed since at least the ninth century in Persia. The printing press allowed a person to address a multitude without being there to say it to them (or copy it by hand). It took hundreds of years, however, for books to become widely accessible. And it took yet more time for those books and newspapers and letters to be shipped from one city or continent to the next. And then societies had to help their citizens become literate for these publications to be read in large numbers.
    In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, we leapt from the speed of transport to the speed of electricity. The telegram allowed people to address each other one to one, within a day, at a price so cheap it eclipsed that of the long-distance phone call. Twenty million telegrams were sent in 1929 alone, this when the world’s population was 1.5 billion. Today, the world is home to 6 billion people and
roughly 600 million e-mails are sent every ten minutes
. Stop for a moment to imagine the ramifications of this exponential increase in communication, and the necessity for a pause cries out like an air-raid siren.
    Previous generations, however giddy they became about the best technology, did stop and think—if briefly. Samuel F. B. Morse sent the first telegram to go through in the United States, from Washington to Baltimore, in May 1844, with the message WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT . By contrast, the first e-mail ever sent using the @ symbol was mailed from one supercomputer to the next in all caps, and according to Ray Tomlinson, the man who sent it, the message contained just a random series ofletters and