The Tyranny of E-mail Read Online Free Page B
Author: John Freeman
numbers. In other words: gibberish. He just wanted to see if it would arrive and so didn’t bother to type anything providential.
It’s about time we asked ourselves a more articulate question: What have we wrought? To answer it, we’re going to have to go back a long way, not just to the dawn of the first information age, when people first began communicating at the speed of electricity, but even further, to when people the world over were just beginning to get mail, and see what happened when the dream of obliterating distance started to become reality.
What follows in the next three chapters is a brief, selective history of how we went from reed stylus to silicon computer chip. At each step of the way, the new manner in which words moved over space introduced a new experience of reality, one that gradually built up to an experience of overload. The democratization of words through education and mail unleashed a blizzard of letters; no longer were they written and read only by a few. The creation of the telegram linked the world by a wire, and the people at home reading newspapers, expanded by telegraphic reports, suddenly had to—like operators for Western Union— tell signal from noise in an entirely different news environment. The creation of the Internet and the PC simultaneously made every inbox a telegram portal of a late-twentieth-century sort; it finally brought about the dream of obliterating distance.
All these developments have brought us to where we are today; in each period governments and crooks have attempted to stay one step ahead of the curve to exploit the increased amount of human traffic going over roads, wires, or T1 cables. Each communication breakthrough has encouraged individuality while expanding the notion of the commons beyond the tangible or nearby.
But for many of us the creation of the Internet has done one thing none of these leaps forward in communication historycould: it has tied us irrevocably, perhaps fatally, to a machine and its superhuman capability. If we are to understand our predicament today, we must reckon with the changes that working at this machine has wrought and examine whether there is a way we can slow down, so we can make the best use of it while retaining a foothold in the real-world commons. Otherwise, we will have bridged the darkness only to introduce ourselves into one of another, more relentless kind.
1
WORDS IN MOTION
I watched a letter that I had written start off on its journey in a howling snowstorm, high in the mountains of Finnish Lapland. The postman was a gnarled little Lapp and his means of transport a flat-bottomed sleigh, drawn by a reindeer…. After three or four hours and perhaps a spill or two in the snow, it would travel five hours by bus and then a day and a night by train to the Finnish capital. From there it would go by ship, steaming in the channel cut by an ice-breaker through the frozen sea to Sweden. Swedish postmen would convey it across their country and put it on an ocean liner. On arrival in New York, the United States Post Office would take charge, and finally an American rural postman would deliver my letter on his rounds in a small Midwestern village. I had paid the equivalent of fourpence for all this service. What is more, I had paid the Finnish Government alone, not the Swedes or Americans. —
L AURIN Z ILLIACUS ,
From Pillar to Post: The Troubled History of the Mail
The success of mail in modern society is, to this day, something of a marvel. By our simply dropping a letter into an iron box, an object we have held and inscribed with wordsthat only we can form may travel around the globe in a matter of days. On such a journey mail has been carried by foot and by horse, by chariot and by pigeon; it’s journeyed by balloon and by bicycle, by train, truck, steamboat, pneumatic tubes, airplane, and even missiles. If a thing can move, it has probably carried mail. Bringing this service to people without a title took thousands
It’s about time we asked ourselves a more articulate question: What have we wrought? To answer it, we’re going to have to go back a long way, not just to the dawn of the first information age, when people first began communicating at the speed of electricity, but even further, to when people the world over were just beginning to get mail, and see what happened when the dream of obliterating distance started to become reality.
What follows in the next three chapters is a brief, selective history of how we went from reed stylus to silicon computer chip. At each step of the way, the new manner in which words moved over space introduced a new experience of reality, one that gradually built up to an experience of overload. The democratization of words through education and mail unleashed a blizzard of letters; no longer were they written and read only by a few. The creation of the telegram linked the world by a wire, and the people at home reading newspapers, expanded by telegraphic reports, suddenly had to—like operators for Western Union— tell signal from noise in an entirely different news environment. The creation of the Internet and the PC simultaneously made every inbox a telegram portal of a late-twentieth-century sort; it finally brought about the dream of obliterating distance.
All these developments have brought us to where we are today; in each period governments and crooks have attempted to stay one step ahead of the curve to exploit the increased amount of human traffic going over roads, wires, or T1 cables. Each communication breakthrough has encouraged individuality while expanding the notion of the commons beyond the tangible or nearby.
But for many of us the creation of the Internet has done one thing none of these leaps forward in communication historycould: it has tied us irrevocably, perhaps fatally, to a machine and its superhuman capability. If we are to understand our predicament today, we must reckon with the changes that working at this machine has wrought and examine whether there is a way we can slow down, so we can make the best use of it while retaining a foothold in the real-world commons. Otherwise, we will have bridged the darkness only to introduce ourselves into one of another, more relentless kind.
1
WORDS IN MOTION
I watched a letter that I had written start off on its journey in a howling snowstorm, high in the mountains of Finnish Lapland. The postman was a gnarled little Lapp and his means of transport a flat-bottomed sleigh, drawn by a reindeer…. After three or four hours and perhaps a spill or two in the snow, it would travel five hours by bus and then a day and a night by train to the Finnish capital. From there it would go by ship, steaming in the channel cut by an ice-breaker through the frozen sea to Sweden. Swedish postmen would convey it across their country and put it on an ocean liner. On arrival in New York, the United States Post Office would take charge, and finally an American rural postman would deliver my letter on his rounds in a small Midwestern village. I had paid the equivalent of fourpence for all this service. What is more, I had paid the Finnish Government alone, not the Swedes or Americans. —
L AURIN Z ILLIACUS ,
From Pillar to Post: The Troubled History of the Mail
The success of mail in modern society is, to this day, something of a marvel. By our simply dropping a letter into an iron box, an object we have held and inscribed with wordsthat only we can form may travel around the globe in a matter of days. On such a journey mail has been carried by foot and by horse, by chariot and by pigeon; it’s journeyed by balloon and by bicycle, by train, truck, steamboat, pneumatic tubes, airplane, and even missiles. If a thing can move, it has probably carried mail. Bringing this service to people without a title took thousands
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