The Tyranny of E-mail Read online

  In the twenty-first century, those of us who work in offices have crawled inside the dynamos, the machines driving the system; we’re keeping it spinning one electronic message at a time. This symbiotic embrace with the machine is something the early pioneers of the computing age hoped for. J. C. R. Licklidder, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the first director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, summed up these hopes in a prescient early paper, “Man-Computer Symbiosis”: “The hope,” he wrote, “is that in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled… tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.”

  Fifty years on, that day seems to be here. To read an e-mail, you must be joined to an electronic machine. What does this machine want? Besides following our commands, it is a machine deeply, fundamentally connected to commerce. More often than anything else, it wants us to work. The new on-the-ball employee proves his worth by his speed of response—at work, at night, on the weekends, on vacations, the instant the announcement is made that it is now safe to use approved electronic devices on airplanes.

  This ethic of being “always on” extends to the home, where it acquires a consumerist dimension. Web-based e-mail, which is used by more than 1 billion people worldwide, remains free because it allows host companies—such as Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft—to deliver advertising messages to people refreshing their inbox screen. Every time your screen reloads, a cluster of messages and graphics coalesces in the margins, blinking and beckoning. It frames what you are about to write or read. We are approaching a world in which every letter we write home, every love poem we read, every condolence note, political petition, and letter of apology we type is framed by a penumbra of automobile ads, perfume pitches, entreaties to enter online gambling emporiums.

  Faster, Faster

  Speed—the god of the twenty-first century—is not a neutral deity, as it turns out. The speed at which we communicate determines what we can do, what we can see, how we perceive, and whether we can adjust our own sense of reality to a larger, more complex frame of reference, one that encompasses the separate needs and points of view of others. Look out a window of a train traveling at full speed, and you will witness this phenomenon at work. The eye constantly darts to the horizon, only to be overwhelmed by a new horizon point, which comes racing forward, followed by another and another. The eye quickly becomes fatigued. The scenery is a blur.

  Working at the speed of e-mail is like trying to gain a topographic understanding of our daily landscape from a speeding train—and the consequences for us as workers are profound. Interrupted every thirty seconds or so, our attention spans are fractured into a thousand tiny fragments. The mind is denied the experience of deep flow, when creative ideas flourish and complicated thinking occurs. We become task-oriented, tetchy, terrible at listening as we try to keep up with the computer. The e-mail inbox turns our mental to-do list into a palimpsest—there’s always something new and even more urgent erasing what we originally thought was the day’s priority. Incoming mail arrives on several different channels—via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, instant message—and in this era of backup we’re sure that we should keep records of our participation in all these conversations. The result is that at the end of the day we have a few hundred or even a few thousand e-mails still sitting in our inbox.

  We’re not lazy; the computer is just far better than the human mind at batching and sorting. E-mail travels to and from computers circuitously, starting with our fingers, which type the characters. Our jokes and jabs are eventually translated into 0s and 1s, fired off through cable and phone lines, and reassembled upon the point of arrival, not unlike a car that has been shipped to the United States from Japan in pieces and assembled there once all the parts have arrived at the port and been sent by train to assembly plants, as one technology writer once put it. Computers and e-mail software are designed to know which parts of the chains belong to which; they can wait for a message to arrive fully before delivering it, and they can do so on a scale that is suprahuman. The computer is the ultimate multitasker—it doesn’t need to pause to write down reminders to itself on a yellow Post-it note. It doesn’t have emotional needs. It doesn’t have days when it is depressed. It needn’t touch a single thing to feel okay about doing its job.

  Look into My Eyes

  Don’t try this argument out on an Internet visionary. The World Wide Web is often described as the biggest invention aiding human knowledge since the printing press. This may be over-blown, since it is impossible to judge at this point—maybe nanotechnology will surpass it, or bioengineering, or battery technology? One thing, however, is clear: the Internet has effected one enormous change in our day-to-day life as it relates to reading, a change so large, but so all encompassing, that we don’t notice it—until we step outside.

  Since the beginning of time, humans have read by reflected light. This gave reading a sacredness—light, after all, is the first thing God creates in the Bible. In the Koran, “God is the Light of the Heavens and the Earth.” Light is a fundamental feature of nearly all founding myths. In Greek mythology, Hyperion, the Titan god of light, is the son of Ourans (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). In “The Kingdom of the Dead,” the gloomiest chapter of Homer’s Odyssey, his hero washes ashore in a place so wretched that “the Eye of the Sun can never flash his rays through the dark and bring them light.” We read to come out of the darkness and into the light.

  Before electric light, reading meant sitting by a window or in a room open to sunbeams, or near a candle after dark. Read outside on a park bench in decent weather, and you will realize how natural this feels. The eye is designed for this kind of light, and our chemical response to it regulates our sleep and our moods, gives our days a natural rhythm. Electric light did not change this equation fundamentally. A bank employee might have to read ledgers under a harsher light, a reporter might sit and type a story before a single bulb, but the light they worked by was still reflected, the light glancing down onto the page and bouncing back up into their eyes, at which point the mind can begin to process what’s on the page.

  The computer screen, however, is an entirely new reading experience. Rather than bouncing down off a surface, light is shot directly into our eyes. It is beamed right into our pupils, and our eyeballs get drier and drier as our blink rate decreases. In the days when computers were used for just word processing, this was not an overwhelming burden. Back then we still read the news and memos and mail in print, by reflected light. But once the Web became so immense it could house large, important sources of information—the home of newspapers, banks, and shopping malls—that were accessed daily, sometimes hourly, the equation changed. And with e-mail, which is checked minute to minute by a great many, that equation exploded. All day long, light is being beamed into our eyes.

  Not surprisingly, this accelerating change in how we read has enormous physical and behavioral consequences. Eyesight has deteriorated with the ages, but it has taken a large leap back during the computer age due to the fact that people spend big chunks of their day focusing on a screen that is two feet in front of their faces. There are even nearsightedness epidemics among children. In Singapore, for instance, 80 percent of children are myopic, up from 25 percent just thirty years ago. Close study of books, but also computers and video games, is thought to be to blame.

  Our eyes are tired, we get headaches, yet we cannot look away from the screen. E-mail is addictive, it has been shown, in the same way that slot machines are addictive. You press the send/receive button just as a gambler pulls down a slot machine lever, because you know that you will receive a reward (mail/a payout) some of the time. The best way to increase the chance of a reward is to press “Send” a lot. In one study, participants manually checked their e-mail thirty to forty times an hour.

  Brave New World—The Lon
ely Crowd

  This shift—the replacement of actual human interaction by a kind of agitated virtual communication, the privileging of the eye above all else—is part of a larger change in our society in which the image has replaced the real thing. We don’t stand before art and experience its mysterious aura (as Walter Benjamin discussed in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) but download its image, buy a poster of it, take home a coffee cup covered with Matisse’s goldfish. As Susan Sontag noted in On Photography, we cannot travel and be tourists without ferrying home images of the place we have visited—as if the purpose of the trip were the collection of the images, not the being there. Brands exist for this reason. Unable to personally see the tailors or, more typically, the sweatshop labor that goes into making products, we are taught how 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 of driving 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 recorded and 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 has become and it is only going 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 this anxiety, 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 cap
s, and according to Ray Tomlinson, the man who sent it, the message contained just a random series of letters and 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.