The Tyranny of E-mail (12 page)

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.
It is now a filing system, data processor, calculator, print shop, editing room, research library, music repository. In recent years, through services such as Skype, it has acted as a telephone and as a videoconferencing chat room. Once Internet browsers that could depict Web sites graphically evolved—programs such as Mosaic and Netscape—the computer became a reading library, a research room, a powerful orienting tool for our
whereness
in the world. In
Interface Culture
, Steven Johnson argues that this is such a powerful shift as to blast open an entirely new space: information space.

The mouse and the keyboard became our compasses for navigating this new realm. In the early days of the Internet, there was so little online that the computer was as necessary to modern life as, well, a compass; we use a compass now only if we’re going off the beaten path, exploring. Once the Internet began to fill with electronic representations of every aspect of modern life, from furniture stores to newspapers, and those online portals created a new epistemology, a realm in which information links can be swiftly, instantly followed by the physical click of a mouse—let alone new markets, new friendships, and new ways of doing business—it was impossible to imagine life without it.

Not surprisingly, we now spend an enormous amount of time in front of our machines. Sixty-five percent of North Americans spend more time with their computer than their spouse. Far more than the dream of simultaneous computing has been achieved; this is a marriage. As Johnson points out, this symbiosis has been helped along by the artfulness of modern
interface design. (Our partners are pretty!) We no longer need to punch-card code into computers or stare at a horrendous lemonade-colored blinking cursor. The point-and-click mouse design that Engelbart conceived and that was first popularized by the Macintosh, then duplicated in every computer since, bridged our old tangible world with the new virtual one. We have a “trash can” and file folders. We get mail. No longer do we have to put a picture on our physical desktop of our kids or our spouse; it can be our screen saver. This virtual desktop is our perch, our catbird seat, our platform into the world of information space, a wormhole out of it into other people’s lives and to-do lists.

What this marriage lacks, however, is physical passion. Computers have become handier, cuter, some might even say sexier, but they do very little to engage us as physical beings. They have almost no smell; only the most fanatical have tried licking them. Until recently, their only sounds were blips and bleeps. Clicks of the mouse can be made with the slightest movement of one hand. Indeed, the one sense they engage overwhelmingly is sight. Our eyeballs. Light beams out of the screens and into our eyes, all day for the deskbound. We move the mouse and watch it navigate the desktop; reload Web pages and watch images appear. It is an interactive medium, which is why it’s vastly superior to television, but only along one part of our physical being. The rest of our senses are effectively browned out.

And so the rise of this new way of living and working has given us a somewhat frightening twenty-first-century update to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea that it was possible, in a heightened state of nature, to become a transparent eyeball, to let that which is the world pass through us and obliterate the subject-object dichotomy. “I am nothing,” he wrote. “I see all.”

Today’s eyeball, however, is at the center of the world; it is pitched to, delighted, dazzled, and in control. This iris is made not for eye contact but for receiving and processing. It is—for a vast part of the day—a data processor.

Perhaps we have evolved enough in the past two centuries to enable us to live this way. I don’t believe this is the case. Humans may adapt to our environment, but we also rebel against adaptations that aren’t working; we mark and sabotage. E-mail has become our primary weapon in marking this rapidly expanding, radically desensualized information space with ourselves, to try to make it more human. And it is perfectly suited to the task because it allows us to spread our thoughts and words faster and farther and wider than ever before.

Until the Internet and e-mail came into being, our primary mode of communication existed on a one-to-one level. We wrote a letter to one person; we placed a phone call and were connected. At work, we could copy a memo and send it to several recipients, but even this required a further step of making copies and then physically delivering them, so the message had better be important. As recipients of media, from television to radio to newspaper and book publishing, we were locked into the other end of a one-to-many model. A broadcaster or editor decided what we might like to listen to or watch on television and sent it out over the airwaves.

The Internet and more specifically e-mail radically altered this process. By simply typing an additional address, we could send the same message to as many recipients as we had addresses. We could forward and duplicate messages as fast as the most heavy-duty copier, faster than any interoffice messenger. We have no need for a young Andrew Carnegie. The only limit to the size of our reach was the size of our address book. We could even e-mail the CEO, and chances are—until recently, when e-mail became untenable for many executives (though not all)—he or she would read it. This instantly turned anyone with an e-mail address into a broadcaster on a small scale; a large scale for so-called power users, who in the early days of e-mail were men and women who received two hundred e-mails a day.

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 history. Walk into any café across America, and you will witness a stirring example
of this phenomenon. Whereas once cafés were filled with people talking to one another or reading books or newspapers, now you will find people sitting alone before the glowing screen of their laptop, typing e-mails, working on documents, chatting with friends a thousand miles away, or surfing the Internet. Sit down with a friend for a face-to-face chat, and you may be scowled at.

In
On Photography
, Susan Sontag wrote about the way that the domestication of photographic technology allowed people to believe that all the world’s images could be indexed, possessed, known. The explosion of e-mail and other text-based communications and the phenomenal ease with which these technologies can be used has done a similar thing to words. If we know something, experience it, see it or do it, complete a task at work, we must record this fact in type and share it with another person. We may not be able to index the known world, but we can create a word-based library of ourselves from moment to moment if we type fast enough and keep in touch with enough people.

Universities, which are stocked with young people eager to chronicle their daily revolutions, were a hothouse for this growth, and it demonstrated how connectivity expands exponentially in an inbox. The explosion of its use on the campus of Simon Fraser University in Canada makes for an interesting test case. SFU was one of the first universities to offer e-mail service to its faculty in 1983, and over the next few years it joined various external networks. In 1986, fifteen hundred students and faculty were using the service, generating between ten and twenty thousand messages per month. Five years later, the number of messages per month had risen to seventy thousand. By 2006, the number of e-mail accounts had increased to forty thousand, but the number of messages had blasted off into an
entirely new galaxy. Each month, SFU users were generating 10 million messages—a
14,000 percent
increase.

The exponential increase seen at Simon Fraser was witnessed across the Internet and around the world. In 1992, just 2 percent of the U.S. population used e-mail; that jumped to 15 percent in 1997, and by 2001 it was estimated to have leapt to 50 percent, perhaps due largely to the number of people who were wired at work. Early stories about e-mail recall Laurin Zilliacus’s breathless wonder at the journey his letter made from Lapland to the American heartland:

John M. Woram went to his mailbox in Rockville Centre, L.I., recently and mailed a letter to a colleague in the Galápagos Islands, 650 miles off the coast of Ecuador. His letter arrived there in five seconds. A reply was waiting in his mailbox the next morning.

“My, how the mail has evolved,” said Mr. Woram, who is writing a history of the islands made famous by Charles Darwin. “It used to take as long as seven months to get a letter there and back.”

Mr. Woram’s magical new mailbox is inside his personal computer at his home, and his correspondence with the Galápagos now travels at the speed of electricity over the global computer network known as the Internet.

This was in the middle 1990s, the era of the Internet’s explosion, when the U.S. Postal Service’s total number of deliveries was ten times the number of electronic messages worldwide, when just 5 percent of American households had a modem. That would change quickly, as many people discovered how easy and convenient it was to send and receive electronic mail. Not
surprisingly, corporations and offices embraced e-mail. Between 2000 and 2002, the number of workers with access to e-mail on the job in the United States almost doubled from 30 million to over 57 million, 98 percent of whom had access to their own account. By 2000, there were 4 trillion e-mails sent globally. In 2007, that number hit 35 trillion—a number that dwarfs the number of text messages (3 trillion) and telephone calls (165 billion minutes in 2005).

Two trends really helped domesticate e-mail. First, it became widely, easily, cheaply available at home through dial-up service, which had indeed existed for more than ten years, but mostly for Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) and owners of specific machines. It truly became an industry in 1995, the year that Prodigy, CompuServe, and especially AOL began offering it over the Internet to customers who were using any kind of PC. In 1995, AOL had 5 million subscribers. By 2003, it was up to 35 million.

The invention of handheld devices played a role in pushing these numbers even higher. In the beginning, these tiny machines were merely very small (and very expensive and easily lost) address books. In 1993, Apple introduced the Newton, which it marketed as the ultimate information tool. In terms of communication, people who wanted to communicate wirelessly were far more likely to own a pager. In 1980, when pagers had a short range of communication, there were 3.2 million in use worldwide. As their range expanded, so did their use: by 1994, there were more than 62 million pagers in use around the globe.

The first BlackBerry was introduced in 1999, and though it ran on AA batteries, it could handle e-mail, paging, and a few organizing functions. As the machines improved, their use skyrocketed. Between 2004 and 2008, the percentage of people
checking their e-mail on a handheld doubled. In one survey, 59 percent of the people who used such devices read their e-mail as soon as it arrived.

Aside from the obvious reasons for this explosion—e-mail is cheap, fast, easy to use, and a lot of people are reachable through it—there is another explanation for this behavior, one that reaches back to the roots of the personal computer and the mind-expansion goals of its creators. The machine did, in fact, become a virtual extension of our minds—an orienting tool, an organizing tool, a tabula rasa upon which we can express our thoughts, and a computing tool all at once. And by virtually extending this surrogate brain into the Internet, we became linked with all the other mind spaces of people who were linked in. In fact, one of the most popular social networking sites on the Internet is called LinkedIn, which allows people to create an online address book of their professional contacts.

As Clay Shirky has astutely noted, this network of connectivity has created new kinds of group collaborations, from Wikipedia to the loose, fanatical collaboration of programmers who work—for free—on the Linux operating system code to make it the best in the world. But it’s also created a physical, external, ever-present viral port for a part of our life that until now has either remained private or moved at a much slower rate: our consciousness. “We are all tainted with viral origins,” says one character in a William S. Burroughs story. “The whole quality of human consciousness, as expressed in male and female, is basically a virus mechanism.”

In other words, the Internet is the perfect host for spreading our viral minds. In the past, human consciousness could be recorded in words and spread as fast as those words could travel— which, as we’ve seen, even with the advent of the telegram, moved fairly slowly. The post buffered us from the full cacophony of human consciousness as it was experienced by all the people we knew around the world. With the advent of e-mail, however, the delivery of those dispatches from the minds of others began to occur more or less instantly. Moreover, they shot right into the working nerve centers of our new surrogate brains.

This is why turning on your computer in the morning— or checking your BlackBerry from home while having your coffee—can feel so overwhelming, so in-your-face, especially when it’s e-mail from the office. It’s not just the number of messages but the feeling that someone has
invaded your head.
So we push back—respond and delete—however, e-mail is insidious, hard to break; it’s hard to figure out when a conversation is concluded. The time it requires to do this work, to type all these messages, did not come out of nowhere. In 2006, the California-based technology research firm Radicati Group reported that the average
office worker sent and received 126 e-mails per day. If it took this busy bee only a minute to read and respond to each and every message, simply keeping up with correspondence would take up a quarter of his day. At the current rate of growth, the Radicati Group estimated that in 2009 the average office worker will spend 41 percent of his or her day reading and responding to e-mails.