The Tyranny of E-mail Read online

  But for many of us the creation of the Internet has done one thing none of these leaps forward in communication history could: 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.

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  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. — LAURIN ZILLIACUS, 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 words that 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 of years. Roads had to be carved into fields and blasted through mountain passes; durable, cheap writing utensils had to be invented and men and women organized into labor forces. To this day, the U.S. Postal Service is the second-largest employer of civilian labor in America, with nearly 800,000 employees (compared with 181,000 in the UK, 160,000 in Germany, and 100,000 in France).

  In ancient civilizations, mail was haphazard for most people—a luxury, a stab in the dark. So the act of sending and receiving a letter was a momentous occasion. Without the highly efficient systems we possess today, letters were delivered informally, through friends or acquaintances planning to travel to a certain location. Along the way the messenger might be robbed, injured, or killed; the absence of a reply was so common that many ancient letters contained complaints about the failure of the recipient to respond to a missive. It would be hard to blame the messenger, though.

  There was very little letter technology. Although clay envelopes dating back to several thousand years B.C. have turned up in Turkey, the paper envelope is a recent invention. Until the late 1800s, schoolchildren in America learned to fold a letter so that it didn’t need one. The stamp, which came into being in India and England in the 1840s, is new, too, along with paper (which appeared in 3500 B.C.), to say nothing of pens (an invention of Egypt in 3000 B.C.) and zip codes (first used in the United States in 1963). Prior to all these developments, people addressed letters on the back of the missive itself or right on top of the text. Seals were important for this reason: they were a stamp of authenticity.

  The history of mail is a tale of how, with the invention of postal systems and the democratization of their use, words began to knit more than just nations together. Words written by hand, then carried by the saddlebags of travelers, kept friendships alive and gave shape and texture to the daily experiences—and the thoughts—of people who wanted to communicate but were not within speaking distance of one another. In arcing across that gap, letters and mail helped create (and remind us of) another gap—the one between the inside and outside world. “It’s separation that weaves the intrinsic world,” Hélène Cixous writes of letters. “A fine, tender separation… like an amniotic membrane that lets the sound of blood pass through.”

  Mail has been the world’s most important artery for transmitting our pulse across that separation. As words and then language were democratized and mail extended to larger parts of the world’s population, that sound has become louder, syncopated, cacophonous. Governments and businesses have listened in; tricksters and thieves have posed as lovers and bearers of good news. Our current age is not the first in which people struggled to keep their inbox tidy. And speed, that perpetual, beckoning messenger, threatens to obliterate the very thing— distance—that made us want to write to begin with. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, the mail just had to get there.

  The Pillar of Empires

  In the beginning, mail was a tool of a few—of governments and militaries and kings. It’s not hard to fathom its usefulness. A well-organized postal service knit enormous stretches of land together; it announced news of battles lost and won, collected intelligence, and delivered the occasional expression of courtly love. Not surprisingly, all the major early empires had some system of carrying letters from one place to the next: the Aztecs, the Incas, the Chinese, the Assyrians, the Romans, the Mauryans. In most cases only government officials could use the service. This was not an enormous deprivation, as most citizens could not read or write. In very important circumstances, they could have letters written for and read to them.

  In the sixth century B.C., the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great boasted a well-organized relay service that could carry mail at a rate of up to a hundred miles a day. The man carrying the message would ride from one post to the next, where he would trade his tired horse for a fresh one, rest, then continue upon his journey. Herodotus sang this system’s praises when he wrote in the histories a comment now inscribed on the Farley Post Office Building in New York City: “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”

  The Persians’ mail service, like so many, was not a benign network, however. It was a tool for making war and controlling an expanding population, upon whom the postal carriers spied and reported back. All the emperors did it. Kublai Khan had more than ten thousand postal stations and some fifty thousand horses at his disposal—and the people who lived near the postal stations learned to fear the carriers. Caliph Abu Jafar Mansur, who ruled the Arabian Empire in the eighth century, expressed mail’s military importance most bluntly: “My throne rests on four pillars and my rule on four persons: a blameless cadi [chief justice], an energetic chief of police, an honest minister of finance, and a faithful postmaster, who gives me true information about everything.” In 860, the Islamic caliphate boasted 930 post stations.

  News of military victories traveled via these early official postal systems, as did instructions for slaughter. As Laurin Zilliacus reminds us, the Book of Esther describes “the use of posts to order the slaughter of the Jews throughout Persian-ruled territory, and then the swift sending of the counter-order that saved them and turned the tables on their persecutors.”

  “And he wrote in the name of the king Ahasueres and sealed it with the king’s ring, and sent letters by posts on horseback,” goes the verse, “riding on swift steeds that were used in the king’s service, bred of the stud.” All of the books of the New Testament, save the Gospels, are written in the form of letters.

  It was not always horses doing the carrying, however. The Arabs later pioneered the use of pigeons. The Greek city-states reserved some of their loftiest poetry for the mind-boggling feats of their athlete-runners. They were known as Hemerodromes and were often called into service when a very important message was to be delivered. Philonides, the courier and surveyor for Alexander the Great, once ran from Sicyon to Elis—148 miles—in a day. Wealthy families had stabl
es of runners, and since nearly all the work was taken care of by their slaves, citizens of leisure had little to do but share their thoughts and gossip in letters to one another. Not surprisingly, a huge volume of correspondence was produced during the height of Greek civilization.

  Augustus Caesar established one of the most impressive ancient postal services. It relied upon the Roman Empire’s superior road network, with stopping-off points—or post houses—where couriers could rest and trade horses. It is for this reason that the word “post” comes from the Latin positus, meaning “fixed,” or “placed.” Mail traveled by horse and chariot, and the postmen of the era wore feathers in their caps, signifying speed. The service was eventually expanded to the general public—those who could write and afford it. When the Roman Empire fell, the network collapsed, and organized communication throughout western Europe disappeared with it.

  Filling the Gap Where Governments Leave Off

  Guilds, trading companies, feudal lords, and marauding armies maintained private messaging systems after the fall of the Roman Empire, but only the Catholic Church possessed anything approaching the organization of the service Caesar had run from Rome. During the medieval period apostolic and pastoral letters “circulated doctrinal rulings, decisions of Episcopal synods, temporal and political matters,” as University of California professor Charles Bazerman has written. The growing orders of monks also kept in touch through lay brothers traveling from one monastery to the next, trips that could take as long as several months, carrying scrolls called rotulae, an early, low-tech version of a Listserv. A scroll would leave a central monastery with simply, say, a list of names of brothers or benefactors who had died and ought to be remembered. At each monastery an addition would be made to the scroll, the local abbot acknowledging receipt of the message and perhaps adding comments or further news. The additions were attached by “thin intertwining parchment strips, so that the lengthening scroll continued to be a very long single sheet,” as Zilliacus describes. One rotula dating from 1122 is 28 feet long and 10 inches wide, covered with writing on both sides. It contained one piece of news, the death of Abbot Saint Vital; all 206 entries that followed paid tribute, some in prayers, some in poetry.

  In Europe, a single family kept mail going outside the realm of government for several centuries. The princely Thurn und Taxis clan carried the mail from Rome to Brussels and beyond, beginning with Ruggiano de Tassis, who began a postal service in Italy. In the early 1500s, they established a postal service based in Brussels and reaching to Rome, Naples, Spain, Germany, and France by courier. The service lasted until the eighteenth century, when it was purchased by an heir to the Spanish throne.

  But the story of the post is not concerned only with past events. It is a continuing saga of man’s attempts to shrink the world by improving the communication of the written word.

  — DMITRY KANDAOUROFF, Collecting Postal History:

  Postmarks, Cards and Covers

  Bridging the Darkness

  It took another three centuries for mail to resemble anything we would recognize today. Most people were illiterate, and paper was enormously expensive. For a woman to mail a letter from the American colonies to England in 1650, for example, she would have had to be exceptional indeed. In From Pillar to Post, Zilliacus imagines such a letter’s journey. The woman would have had to pick out a piece of rag paper, inscribe her message, then fold it four or five times, bind it in silk and seal it with wax, and perhaps draw a sign of the cross on it to signal that this letter traveled under the sign of Providence. Then there was the issue of the recipient’s address, which required a bit of space: “To my most noble brother, Mr. John Miles Breton,” wrote one woman, “at Ye barber shoppe which lieth in the land hard against Ye taverne of Ye Great Square in shadow of Ye Towne Hall in Stockholm, these.”

  After she took it to her local tavern—America’s first postman, Richard Fairbanks, pulled pints as his day job—the letter would have to jump aboard a trading vessel and essentially bribe its way across the seas and every step of the way. It was expensive and very likely bound for failure. “Letters were treasured,” writes Frances Austin in “Letter Writing in a Cornish Community in the 1790s,” “read to neighbors and handed round to friends. Items of news were passed on, often almost verbatim.” In one case, Austin discovered that a woman had copied a letter from her brother and mailed copies to each of her siblings.

  Imagine, then, living at this time. If you emigrated to a new country and left relatives behind, they would in all likelihood be lost to you forever. At the close of day, eating by candlelight, going to sleep in the obsidian darkness beneath a sky punctured by a blizzard of stars and unmarred by the electric pulse of distant cities or the blinking of far-off satellites, you would be alone, save for those around you. A knock at the door could spell danger or bad news. If the visit brought a letter from far away, it would probably feel like a small miracle. “The letters delivered in the countryside have marvelously multiplied,” wrote Richard Jeffries in The Life of the Fields in 1884, “but still the country people do not treat letters offhand. The arrival of a letter or two is still an event; it is read twice or three times, put in a pocket and looked at again.”

  The Dawn of the Golden Age of Letter Writing

  Between the dawn of the printing press and the end of the early to middle nineteenth century, societies arose in England, France, and Germany that broke down the barriers that had previously kept many people in the dark concerning the written word. Books became more available and began crossing national boundaries. By 1873, more than 129 million book packets traveled through the post every year in Great Britain.

  The printing press and changes in the epistemological makeup of religions forged the way for a new reading public. In many Christian religions, only pastors and priests were trusted with the word of God. Besides, books were scarce; monks used to teach from texts chained to the lectern. In Sweden in the eighteenth century, though, the Lutheran Church issued an injunction that everyone must be able to read the word of God, and a massive literacy campaign was launched. Within a hundred years the nation boasted a 100 percent literacy rate. The decline of illiteracy in England was equally sharp but took much longer. Between 1500 and 1900, literacy rates rose from 10 percent to 95 percent for men and from less than 5 percent to 95 percent for women. In the early American colonies, where religious injunction required that believers be able to read the Bible themselves, men had a 100 percent literacy rate.

  Mandatory schooling helped democratize words, too. In 1790, “Pennsylvania made provision in its constitution to provide free education to the poor, an effort endorsed by a number of cities and states in the first half of the nineteenth century,” according to Naomi S. Baron in From Alphabet to Email. In 1827, Massachusetts underwrote common schools through taxation, and in 1852 New York was the first state to require statewide compulsory education. The earliest English public schools were chartered to educate the poor, but it wasn’t until the middle of the eighteenth century that religious organizers began providing systematic day school and Sunday school education. Parliament started funding schools in 1833, while also restricting child labor, and by 1880, all of England and Wales “were required to establish minimum education standards.”

  Letter-writing manuals sprang up to allow the “middling sort” to “pursue their claims to social refinement and upward mobility,” as one scholar put it. One of the most popular, Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions, was published by Samuel Richardson in 1741 and portrayed letter writing as “suitable for all occasions in life and for all people in society.” At the same time, penmanship manuals, spelling books, grammar books, and dictionaries took off. Between 1750 and 1800, nearly four hundred such works were published in the United States alone. Guidebooks to letter writing multiplied, in the process transforming the use of the English language. The oral quality of early letters returned and was encouraged: “When you write to a friend,” wrote W. H. D
ilworth in The Complete Letter-Writer, “your letter should be a picture of your heart.” “When you sit down to write a letter,” another advised, “remember that this sort of writing should be like conversation.” Dilworth again: “Your language should be so natural… the thoughts may seem to have been conceived in the very words… and your sentiments to have sprung up naturally like lilies of the field.”

  In a new development and with increasing regularity, these appeals were directed at women. Until this point, it was generally assumed that only men wrote letters. But from the mid–eighteenth century, the gender division of letter writing began to be questioned publicly. The Ladies Complete Letter Writer appeared in London in 1763 and was imported to America. “Your sex,” wrote one adviser, “much excels our own, in the ease and graces of epistolary correspondence.”

  Letter writing also became an important part of childhood instruction, in both England and America. Benjamin Franklin believed young boys should learn by putting pen to paper to send a message. “The Boys should be put on Writing Letters to each other on any common Occurences, and on various Subjects, imaginary Business, & c. containing little Stories,” he wrote in Idea of the English School in 1751. “Accounts of their late Reading, what Parts of Authors please them, and why…. In these they should be taught to express themselves clearly, concisely, and naturally, without affected Words or high-flown Phrases.”

  Franklin extended such advice to writers of business letters. In April 1777, he replied at length to a gentleman who had written offering some assistance to the American colonies in the coming War of Independence: “Whoever writes to a Stranger should observe 3 Points; 1. That what he proposes be practicable. 2. His Propositions should be made in explicit Terms so as to be easily understood. 3. What he desires should be in itself reasonable. Hereby he will give a favourable Impression of his Understanding, and create a Desire of further Acquaintance.”