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Jan
13
“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.” —Don Knuth, Stanford University
In North America, 65 percent of us spend more time with our computer than with our spouse.
Once you get past feeling like a geek for reading a book about e-mail, John Freeman’s The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, is everything I needed and nothing I expected. Freeman does a fantastic job of telling the story about the history of communication, pausing along the way to analyze the social and psychological implications for how we communicate. “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.”
Reading The Tyranny was a lot like reading an updated version of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death which is also an incriminating and enlightening journey through history, primarily though the lens of television and entertainment.
Here are my highlights from The Tyranny…
Blame Literacy
“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.”
“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.”
“In 1840, the average American sent three letters a year; by 1900 that figure was sixty-nine letters per annum and the total volume of letters outnumbered telegrams fifty to one. By 1950, the mail was almost out of control; in 1960, the U.S. Post Office was handling 63 billion pieces of mail—the equivalent of 350 pieces per year for every man, woman, and child in America.”
“Since most people didn’t send and receive telegrams regularly, the telegraph made the biggest impact in their lives by increasing the scope of the world it brought to them. This new, globalized sense of now would soon test the limits of human empathy. Small-town residents in the United States suddenly found it difficult to put local news into the context of large-scale disasters around the world. One newspaper, the Alpeno Echo in Michigan, defiantly shut down its incoming telegraph service, tired of becoming the world’s echo chamber rather than a record of its own community. ‘It could not tell why the telegraph company caused it to be sent a full account of a flood in Shanghai, a massacre in Calcutta, a sailor fight in Bombay, hard frosts in Siberia,’ Standage wrote, ‘and not a line about the Muskegon fire.’”
“Communication—the conveyance of meaning from one person to the next—depends on how we frame it.”
E-Mail is Re-Programming Us
“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.”
“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.”
“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.’”
“If we’re performing an action that doesn’t always pay out, but does some of the time, such as playing the slots, the lesson learned is that if we want a reward we need to keep pulling that lever.”
“A work climate that revolves around multitasking and constant interruptions has narrowed our cognitive window down to a core, basic facility: rote, mechanical tasks.”
“This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, workplace meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen? Yet in 2006, it was discovered that Americans spent more than half of their life connected to various forms of media. This means we spend more time engaged in media than we do sleeping, more hours plugged in than we log at work. We work in order to have time to watch. We spend more time with our computers than our spouses. We check our e-mail more often than we drink water.”
Freeman argues for a “slow communication movement.”
The Slow Food movement recognized this twenty years ago, when delegates from fifteen countries drafted a manifesto. “In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes,” they wrote. In other words, we may be able to get oranges from Chile and water from Switzerland, but the carbon emissions involved in shipping them to our doorstep so we can enjoy them are destroying our environment and putting local growers and farmers out of business. Communication works the same way. If we spend our evening online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the people we could turn to for solace, humor, and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this.
“It starts with a simple instruction: Don’t send.”
For what it’s worth, I’ve been making subtle changes to my “digital” life for the past two years. Most recently, and because of this book, I’ve also altered my e-mail habits pretty significantly. I’m going on two weeks of establishing new rhythms and it’s been really difficult! The results have been well worth it. I’m less hurried, I’m more focused and I’m chipping away at some big tasks that I wouldn’t have otherwise.
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2 Responses to “The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman”
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Brad, I’d be interested to hear what changes you’ve been making to your digital life. I have made quite a few changes this past year myself.
Have you heard of Inbox Zero? I have used that to help tame my email habits. I try to check my email only a few times each day (instead of a few times per hour).
Vin, I’m hesitant to share the changes because I want to make sure I can stick with them to at least become a habit! Nonetheless, it certainly involves checking email a lot less, not using the computer after certain hours, not getting email on my cell phone, etc.