|
|
FreTyra 10-04-054 |
|
|
The Tyranny
of E-Mail The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox John
Freeman Scribner,
2009, 244 pp. ISBN 978-1-4165-7673-0 |
|
Freeman is a writer and book critic who has
written for numerous national publications.
He takes us on an entertaining look at correspondence through the ages
and shows how we got here from there. The
flood of email messages is ceaseless. He
tries to slow things down for a moment and help us see the enormous shift in
time and space caused by email. He begs
us to be more selective, nuanced, and sociable in our communications. “No man can be turned into a permanent
machine….” Mahatma Gandhi The average office worker sends and receives two
hundred e-mails a day. This is
destroying our ability to be productive.
“Email has made us a workforce of reactors, racing to keep up with a
treadmill pace that is bound for burnout and breakdown and profound anger.”
(6) Email has reoriented time. Everything must be attended to. “Had there been stretched across the Continent
yesterday a line of clocks extending from the extreme eastern point of Maine
to the extreme western position on the Pacific coast, and had each clock
sounded an alarm at the hour noon, local time, there would have been a
continuous ringing from the east to the west lasting for 3 ¼ hours. At noon today, there will undoubtedly be
confusion.” –The New York Times, 1883
(p. 61) The myriad of time zones reinforced the nature
and importance of distance; the context of life was local. Most of the rest of the world was truly
elsewhere. “This was not a confusing
experience until two of the nineteenth century’s most powerful technological
forces, the railroad and the telegram, combined.” (66) Adjusting to a frame of reference created
by electronic communication was a vast change. It helped create a sense of nationality.
(67) “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to
more things than love. We have
minimized and condensed our emotions… We have destroyed the memory of
yesterday with the worries of tomorrow… We do not feel and enjoy; we
assimilate and appropriate.” (77, quoting the London Star, 1901) “The PC, however, introduced an entirely new way
of living and doing business by becoming the portal through which all of our work is done.” And it is impossible to imagine life without
the internet. (95) What is lacking is physical passion. “Computers have become handier, cuter, some
might even say sexier, but they do very little to engage us as physical
beings. … Indeed, the one sense they engage overwhelmingly is sight. … The
rest of our senses are effectively browned out.” (96) Anyone with an email address is a small scale
broadcaster. “This shift, from
receiving to generating media, has created an enormous epistemological shift
between reading and writing, from talking to writing. Reading, by virtue of the constant
interruptions we face due to electronic communication, is harder than ever
before, whereas typing and publishing have become easier than at any point in
human hsitory.” (98) Turning on your BlackBerry in the morning while
having coffee can feel like someone has invaded your head. (103) One research group estimates the average office
worker spent 41% of his day reading and responding to emails in 2009.
(104) Your inbox can become a rolling
to-do list. When you see twenty emails
in your inbox it is clear that everyone is waiting for you. The faster you respond, the faster the
replies come boomeranging back to you.
(105) The work day becomes a
multitasking exercise. Because facial expressions and body language are
absent, the tone is often misunderstood.
“We sneak a peek before going to work and clock
in before going to bed. It’s our
midnight snack, our reminder we are needed, the mother of all time killers.”
(108) “If Martin Luther were alive today, he possibly
would be e-mailing his theses around instead of nailing them to church
doors. But the question remains
whether his ideas would be lost in the wash.” (110) Spam isn’t going away. It’s too lucrative. Spammers can become millionaires on a
response rate of 1 in 12 million e-mails.
(127) “Nothing is fully protected once you hit the send
button.” (129) “…we can’t seem to log off. We haven’t just tried to merge with the
machine, to marry it; it has become our iron lung.” (135) Why are we so obsessed? There is a mixture of good and bad
expectations when we check email.
Checking email is like playing slot machines. They work on the principle of “variable
interval reinforcement.” Not every
time, but sometimes, the action is rewarded.
The lesson learned is that to get the reward, you keep pulling the
lever. So it is with email. (136-37) “E-mail has become a way to be reminded that we
exist in a world overloaded with connections, that we are needed.” (138) “What information consumes is rather obvious: it
consumes the attention of its recipients.
Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a
need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of
information sources that might consume it.” (140, quoting Herb Simon) “We work in the most distraction-prone workplace
in the history of mankind.” (140) “Our use of technology has begun to alter our
attention span; we’ve started reverse engineering our brains for speed, as
opposed to mindfulness.” (141) “Reading and other meditative tasks are best
performed in…a ‘state of flow,’ in which our focus narrows, the world seems
to drop away, and we become less conscious of ourselves and more deeply
immersed in ideas and language and complex thought. Many communication tools,
however, actually inhibit this state.” (142) An e-mail to a friend may, if clever or
embarrassing enough, be read by hundreds of thousands of people. An e-mail to a large group may not be read
by any of them.” (147) Three trademark symptoms of burnout: emotional
exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of individual
accomplishment. Excessive work hours
and expectations make work a major cause of health problems. (161)
“As e-mail use grows, the stresses of working at this frantic pace
will only compound, becoming an ever-stronger feedback loop.” (163) “It’s almost considered chic to be a workaholic.”
(164) “Spouses are not the only ones
neglected when we can’t put down our e-mail.
A whole generation of children will grow up with ever more distracted
parents.” (165) “By tying ourselves to this machine, we make a
trade: virtual interaction for physical togetherness.” (172) “Eye-tracking studies have shown that people
increasingly tend to leapfrog over long blocks of text. We need bullet points, bold text, short
sentences, explanatory subheads, and speedy test. People skim and scan rather than rummage
down into the belly of the beast.” (177) [Did you read this whole paragraph?
Dlm] “What we are losing … is the sustained, focused,
linear attention developed by reading.
Virtually all tests show a universal decline in reading ability and
comprehension. Yet reading comprehension
is one of the top skills in demand for well-paying jobs. (179)
Contact with the natural world reminds us of our
limitations. But many who work in
offices don’t touch a single natural substance all day long. (188) “Given that our days are limited, our hours
precious, we have to decide what we want to do…. In short, we need to slow down.” (191) Emailing “is encroaching on parts of our
lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability
to know our world.... We need to learn
to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain
control of our lives.” (192) “The convenience and speed of the Internet have
drawn us powerfully into a virtual world in which distance appears not to matter. At the end of the day, though, we need to
live in the physical world….”
(195) “We need to protect the finite well of our
attention if we care about our relationships. … We need time to shape and
design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean. Communicating at great haste hones our
utterances down to instincts and impulses that until now have been held back
or channeled more carefully.” (197) Some of the author’s recommendations:
|
|
*
* * * * *
Your comments and book
recommendations are welcome.
To discontinue receiving
book notes, hit Reply and put Discontinue in the text.