The Tyranny of E-mail (20 page)

The expectations and concomitant stress trickle down to people who do not even work in the tech industry, thanks to cultural worship of their success and the groups of people who make money by investing in it through hedge funds, smart stock tips, or just plain dumb luck. In Jonathan Franzen’s novel
The Corrections
, Gary, the banker brother of the book’s protagonist, Chip, cannot help but feel he somehow missed the boat, that he is behind the times, and that that makes him not just unrich but uncool. “All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary—of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool.”

One group of workers who are feeling this strain more than most—aside from the people who have actually lost their jobs— are bloggers, since some of them are tasked with staying on top
of the continuous news and product cycle. In 2008, two technology bloggers may even have blogged themselves to death. Russell Shaw, a contributor to ZDNET, and Marc Orchant, another U.S. tech blogger, died as a result of massive coronaries on the job. The pressures of this environment are unbearable. “There’s always a new mobile phone whose clunkiness requires dissection, a new security flaw in Windows Vista, or a new USB drive shaped to look like a piece of fruit,” wrote Peter Robinson in
The Guardian
. “Keeping on top of it all is an almost impossible task, but people try, and they burn out, knowing that if they sleep, they’re scooped.”

As e-mail use grows, the stresses of working at this frantic pace will only compound, becoming an ever-stronger feedback loop. We may not quite e-mail ourselves to death, but on heavy days it can feel as if we’re getting close to it. A society of people living constantly in this frame of mind does not make for a pleasant place. Impulse gratification is highly catered to in the Western world—it’s what keeps the capitalist market running, after all. Most of our purely biological and social needs are simple; we need to create other needs in order to have a reason for purchasing something, for buying based on brand rather than on quality, for believing—as advertisements tell us—that a car or a chair or a pair of jeans will make us a different person, as glamorous as the one in the picture.

By parceling our days into smaller and smaller units, by giving us the impression that we can reach all people, at all times, e-mail is helping to put this cycle of overworking and impatient desire for gratification into hyperdrive. We work to live, the saying goes, but when work takes everything, what’s the point? Changing gears at the end of the day only reminds us how much work is taking from us—all while advertisements tell us the sky is the limit. It’s almost easier to keep working. And people do.
A 2000 study showed that 40 percent of people work overtime at least once a week—and people who earned between $30,000 and $60,000 were three times as likely as people making less than $30,000 to bring work home. It’s almost considered chic to be a workaholic. In early 2008, the pop star Madonna, who had made herself famous as the material girl, admitted to
Elle
magazine that she and her husband, Guy Ritchie, were so busy that
both of them
slept with their BlackBerry under their pillows. “It’s not unromantic,” she protested. “It’s practical. I’m sure loads of couples have their BlackBerrys in bed with them. I often wake up in the middle of the night and remember that I’ve forgotten something, so I jump up and make notes.” News of the couple’s impending divorce began trickling out in the summer of 2008.

New technology tools from broadband access to mobile phones to mobile Internet have indeed made work more convenient. The new flexible workplace allows people to skip a commute when traffic snarls, work remotely, schedule their work around their life. “It’s the proverbial blessing and curse,” said Douglas M. Steenland, the CEO of Northwest Airlines, of his BlackBerry in 2005. “It’s a blessing because it liberates you from the office. It’s a curse because there’s no escape.” The downside to this existence, which many non-CEOs now share, is that we never totally shut off and live in the present with our spouses or friends or family. “Blending is a bland term that disguises what is really a new mind-body problem,’ says Professor Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist at Berkeley. “For some people, like your neighbors and sometimes your children, your body is there but your mind is not. And for others, like your workmates, your mind is there but your body is not. Sometimes it’s nice to have both your mind and your body present.’”

This state of living on parallel tracks has always been part of married life—the challenge always being finding moments
to connect. As e-mail went mobile and became domesticated, though, it evolved into a great enabler for people to stay disconnected from one another—an irony given that one of BlackBerry’s advertising slogans is “Connect to everything you love.” A Berkeley woman whose husband brings his handheld device under the covers described the experience in terms more fitting for an affair. “It’s a kind of ménage à trois that I didn’t choose, but there it is, every day and night,” she said in a
New York Times
article. “There is something about that tap-tap-tap that makes me a little crazy,” said another woman, who was considering confining her husband’s bedtime e-mailing to business trips.

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. In an interview with
The New York Times
, Bruce Mehlman, former assistant secretary of commerce for technology policy, argued that mobile access to e-mail and the Internet allowed him to spend less time at work and more with his kids. He then described having Lego dogfights with his son, one hand on the imaginary plane, the other on his BlackBerry. When he needs a break to clock in, Mehlman made sure to win the “dogfight.” “While he rebuilds his plane, I check my e-mail on the BlackBerry,” he explained.

There is a small but telling lesson buried in this untouching tableau. The Industrial Revolution, which mechanized production on a scale never before seen in human life, also produced the movement for the eight-hour workday. Men, women, and children couldn’t keep up with the durable, mindless muscle of machines. As early as 1817, the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen instituted the slogan “Eight hours work, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.” It took another century, however, for this idea to become law. It wasn’t codified in the United States until 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, making
it the legal American workday—this in a society that was still climbing out of the Great Depression and into a war. Seventy-five years later, however, our abuse and worship of essentially useful technology have chipped away at this framework. It has readjusted our expectations and, more important, made the company, the corporation and its needs, the dominant context in our lives. And we are going along with it because it makes us feel good, needed, important, connected. We are also being paid less, and to resist would in some cases mean losing our jobs. It is important to note, though, that this is not the only contextual shift e-mail has brought about or accelerated.

As we spend more and more time online, working at great speed via e-mail on behalf of our employers, it is only natural for us to try and bring the Internet back to ourselves. One of the great paradoxes about e-mail is that although it is created, driven, and indelibly marked by ourselves, heavy use of it can leave you feeling emptied out, voided, fractured into a million bits and quips, yet somehow obliterated. The cultural critic Fredric Jameson’s comments on postmodern architecture could apply well here: “A constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume…. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and body.”

In the past couple years, several tools have developed to help us feel—in this new work and living environment—whole again. Social networking Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook are at the forefront of this movement and have become
hugely popular for this reason. Facebook was launched on the campus of Harvard University by a sophomore, Mark Zuckerberg, in February 2004 as a way to help his classmates connect online. Within a month, half of the university’s undergraduates had signed on; a month later it was expanded to several other Ivy League universities and thereafter to colleges and high schools. Soon everyone wanted to join in. More and more users were over thirty years old, but Facebook’s greatest support continued to be among college students. A 2006 survey found that Facebook was the second-most popular thing among college students after the iPod; it tied for second with beer. In 2006 it had 9 million registered users. By the summer of 2009, that number had rocketed to 250 million.

Ticker tape, which was developed from the telegram for the purpose of business and urgent news, has found a twenty-first-century use in transporting the news about ourselves on sites such as Facebook, which encourages you to broadcast what “you are doing” to your friends, or Twitter, which allows you to post short messages to a “channel” that can be accessed (and commented upon) by handheld or computer. In fact, given how much time many people spend on these sites—or interacting through e-mail—it’s fair to say that
we are now the news
. It’s a fascinating reversal from just seventy years ago. In John Dos Passos’s epic
U.S.A
. trilogy, bursts of ticker-tape news interrupt the story, putting the lives of his characters into the shadow of an ever more rapid present: these snippets of news also continuously called into question what was the defining context of a life—the swell of history it rides upon or the thoughts of the travelers in the moment? “I wish I was hard enough so that I didn’t give a damn about anything,” says one character. “When history’s walking on all our faces is no time for pretty sentiments.”

A lot has changed in postwar America and around the globe—
not just economic circumstances—to make this not so. Advertising promoted the idea of individuality to the point that people’s desire to appear special, different, and other actually made them seem more like a crowd, a trend Hal Niedzviecki has described hilariously in
Hello, I’m Special
, such as the generation of disaffected teens who bought carefully distressed, grubby-looking clothes at Urban Outfitters and all wound up looking the same. Also, as Jean Twenge argues in
Generation Me
, an entire generation of children was raised to believe that self-esteem was the most important thing in their well-being. This led them to feel more entitled than ever and emptier when their high expectations were not fulfilled. In this way, around the Western world but especially in America, one of the most coddled generations ever created is more miserable than can be imagined.

One offshoot of this new narcissism is “egosurfing,” in which one searches the Internet for information about oneself. A company—egoSurf—was created especially to do this. Google, however, quickly took over the market; you can now simply put a Google alert on your name, and any time you are mentioned on the Internet an e-mail will be sent to your inbox. Even the famous—perhaps especially the famous—are afflicted by it. In Tim Parks’s 2006 novel
Cleaver
, a disgraced news presenter retreats into the Austrian Alps to lick his wounds. Surrounded by mountain vistas and the ticking silence of a lush remove, he cannot help ducking into an Internet café to Google himself.

As Cleaver discovers, once we project our self out into the world and begin tracking it on the Internet, no amount of feedback is enough. The pit of identity vertigo is bottomless. “Friend confirmations come in every minute,” wrote Brian Palmer, a student in Pittsburgh. “How can I not click onto Facebook and see if someone new has listed me as a friend? But Facebook doesn’t make me feel like I have friends. Friends aren’t supposed to let you
sink deeper into an addiction.” No amount of virtual connectivity will ever suffice, either, because face-to-face interaction provides things that online conversation can never deliver: touch, the complex emotional valences of expression and smell, inflection or tone of voice, the awkward but essential jaggedness of being present in the world. “There is a kind of famine of warm interpersonal relations, of easy-to-reach neighbors, of encircling, inclusive memberships, and of solid family life,” says the social scientist Robert Lane. “I have never checked my e-mail more obsessively in my life,” wrote Twenge of her experience in online dating.

The middle distance fell away, so the grids (from small to large) that had supported the middle distance fell into disuse and ceased to be understandable. Two grids remained… there was a national life—a shimmer of national life—and intimate life. The distance between these two was very great. The distance was very frightening. People did not want to measure it. People began to lose a sense of what distance was and of what the usefulness of distance might be.

—
G
EORGE
W. S. T
ROW
,
Within the Context of No Context

In 1980, alarmed at what he felt television was doing to American life, George W. S. Trow published one of the most prophetic essays about the direction of what was then called the Media Age. Trow believed we had been lured from smaller, tangible groups, such as women’s clubs and bowling leagues, out into the false camaraderie of television programs. Tuning in to the tube, we instantly exchange a virtual world for the real one. We have friends because we can tune in to the crew
of
CSI: Miami
most nights. Newspapers, which reported the world, gave way to television news pitched to viewers based on demographics, a contextual shift that eroded people’s sense of history on both a large and a small scale. The vacuum created by the loss of what Trow called “middle distance” institutions was quickly filled. “It is in this space,” Trow wrote, “that celebrities dance.”