The Tyranny of E-mail (27 page)

Authors: John Freeman

BOOK: The Tyranny of E-mail

11.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

If you have been having trouble sleeping, it’s possible you might gradually feel your body slow down at last. The person who has been sitting next to you on the couch might sharpen in focus; stresses at your job could begin to seem less like Armageddon and more like something happening
over there
. That cluster of what-ifs and niggling doubts that is occluded by work and
the pace of your schedule might slide back into view. Maybe you will finally go back to French lessons, read the newspaper; maybe you can make it home in time to watch your daughter’s soccer game. You might begin to think of the people in your life who aren’t always in touch via e-mail, wonder how they’re doing.

This awareness—this presence in the moment—is what gives us the power to act and make decisions, to shape our own lives and truly touch other people. Life might change in the blink of an eye, as the cliché goes, but we also take part in that change and steer it by living purposefully. Of all the things e-mail overload robs from us—be it the pleasure of our work, the strength of our eyes, or even the relationships that flame out through its lack of social cues—this is the most severe. Watching the abuse of e-mail start to choke this mindfulness out of friends and coworkers, strangers on the street, I realized that this is not simply an issue for efficiency experts but a serious epistemological concern for our society. It is affecting our capacity to know one another and the world, to listen. It’s grave enough that if we allow it to continue unchecked, we will have nothing worth sending—a terrible loss. Worst of all, if these past few years are any gauge, that won’t stop e-mail from arriving, either.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Henry.
The Education of Henry Adams
. Ed. Ernest Samuels. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

Alvarez, A.
The Writer’s Voice
. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2005.

Anderson, Benedict.
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
New York: Verso, 2006.

Baker, Nicholson.
Vox: A Novel.
New York: Random House, 1992.

Bamford, James.
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies
. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

Baron, Naomi S.
Alphabet to E-mail: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading
. London: Routledge, 2001.

———.
Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World
. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Beard, George Miller.
American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences.
New York: Putnam, 1881.

Berger, John.
And our faces, my heart, brief as photos
. New York: Vintage, 1991.

———.
Ways of Seeing.
London: Penguin Books, 1972.

Blaise, Clark.
Time Lord: Sir Sandford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time
. New York: Vintage, 2000.

Brock, Gerald W.
The Second Information Revolution
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Burroughs, William S.
Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader.
New York: Grove, 2000.

Cixous, Hélène.
Stigmata: Escaping Texts
. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005.

Crystal, David.
Language and the Internet
. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Davis, Mike.
Dead Cities
. New York: New Press, 2002.

Debord, Guy.
The Society of the Spectacle
. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1995.

DeGrandpre, Richard.
Digitopia: The Look of the New Digital You
. New York: AtRandom.com, 2001.

Dos Passos, John.
1919
. New York and Boston: Mariner, 2000.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.
Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
. New York: New American Library, 1965.

Faust, Drew Gilpin.
This Republic of Suffering
. New York: Knopf, 2008.

Franzen, Jonathan.
The Corrections
. New York: Picador, 2002.

Goffman, Erving.
The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life
. New York: Anchor, 1959.

Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon.
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Herodotus.
The Histories
. Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Holub, Miroslav.
The Dimension of the Present Moment and Other Essays
. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.

Homer.
The Odyssey.
Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Howe, Daniel Walker.
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848.
New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Iacoboni, Marco.
Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Jameson, Fredric.
Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism
. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

Johnson, Steven.
Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Kern, Stephen.
The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Lasch, Christopher.
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations.
New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1991.

Lesser, Bill, and Steve Baldwin.
Net Slaves: True Tales of Working the Web.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.

Lubrano, Annteresa.
The Telegraph: How Technology Innovation Caused Social Change.
New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

Marcus, Gary.
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.

Markoff, John.
What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Subculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
. New York: Viking, 2005.

Maslach, Christina, and Michael P. Leiter.
The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to Do About It
. New York: Jossey-Bass, 1997.

McKibben, Bill.
The Age of Missing Information
. New York: Plume, 1993.

Miller, Henry.
Tropic of Capricorn
. New York: Grove Press, 1994.

Niedzviecki, Hal.
Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity
. San Francisco: City Lights, 2006.

Paterson, Don.
The Blind Eye: The Book of Late Advice.
London: Faber and Faber, 2007.

Revell, Donald.
The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye
. Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2007.

Rothko, Mark.
The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2004.

Rykwert, Joseph.
The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City
. New York: Vintage, 2002.

Scarry, Elaine.
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Schama, Simon.
Landscape and Memory.
New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Sheeler, James.
Finale Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives
. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

Shirky, Clay.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.

Sontag, Susan.
Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
. New York: Picador, 2001.

———.
On Photography.
New York: Picador, 2001.

Stille, Alexander.
The Future of the Past
. New York: Picador, 2003.

Trow, George W. S.
Within the Context of No Context
. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

Twenge, Jean M.
Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before
. New York: Free Press, 2006.

Zilliacus, Laurin.
From Pillar to Post: The Troubled History of the Mail
. London: Heinemann, 1956.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not exist were it not for the gentle, congenial presence of Colin Robinson, who drew the topic out of me over lunch, thereby proving that face-to-face meetings can be vastly more productive than e-mail ping-pong. His wit and encouragement and sharp edits greatly improved the writing, and I will be forever grateful to him for leading me to believe I could even write a book in the first place.

A work of nonfiction always rests upon the work of writers who have come before, and my debts in this case are substantial. I am not a neuroscientist or computer specialist, but the science and technology reporters of
The New York Times
, whose work I quote and refer to throughout the book, dating back to the nineteenth century, and particularly Katie Hafner, were illuminating and pointed me in many fruitful directions.

Early on in the writing of this book, conversations with Lawrence Joseph clarified my thinking, and I am grateful to him for his synthetic intelligence and for pointing me to Stephen Kern’s tremendous
The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918
. I was also motivated early on by the work of Tom Standage, Clark
Blaise, Naomi S. Baron, and Don Paterson. I was particularly moved by Ayse and Yasar Kemal, who reminded me of the sensuous purpose of creating an artifact.

I am grateful to Scribner for having such a committed team of optimists standing behind a first book. Thank you to Susan Moldow and Nan Graham for their friendship, good company, and determination to get this right. Brant Rumble has been as patient and steady-handed an editor as I could ever hope for, and I am very grateful for his stewardship. Thank you as well to Kate Bittman for humor and belief.

Thank you, Sarah Burnes, for seeing the potential in this book and for encouraging me to take the long view, for being so constantly unflappable, and for chipping in at all the right moments. Thank you, too, Alison Cohen, Stephanie Cabot, and David Gernert. In London I would take to the field with Arabella and Abner Stein any day.

Thank you to Sigrid Rausing and Eric Abraham for generously giving me time out of the office to publish this book, and thank you to the staff of
Granta
magazine, in particular Ellah Allfrey, Liz Jobey, Simon Willis, Roy Robins, Patrick Ryan, and Emily Greenhouse, for putting up with my absence.

Thank you, Richard and Raine Hermsdorf, for storing my library all those years and keeping my office free; Leslie, for getting me to quit.

I perhaps may never have written this book were it not for the love and support of my family; my father, who spent a good part of ten years following me around the streets of Carmichael with a car full of newspapers, showing me how not to quit. Thank you, Andy, for good cheer and your example; to Tim for strength and brilliance; and especially my mother, whom I dearly wish could read this and know it is for her.

Finally, I have to thank the biggest e-mail crank of them all, this book’s muse and sternest devotee, who has embraced earnestness in the face of Englishness, and disorder to a point. I am working on the latter. In the meantime, for you I am most grateful of all.

INDEX

addiction to e-mail,
16
,
133
,
134-39
,
165

address,
24-25
,
29-30
,
92
,
143-44
,
146
,
147

Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA),
11
,
91
,
132

advertising,
11-12
,
55-58
,
94
,
168
,
174
.
See also
spam

American colonies,
29-30
,
31
,
33
,
35

“Americanitis,”
78

ancient civilizations, mail in,
24-28

anonymity,
49-50
,
146
,
150
,
151

anxiety,
19-20
,
76-80
,
133

AOL (America Online),
101
,
124
,
125
,
126
,
135

ARPANET,
86-92
,
118
,
120
,
121
,
132
,
186