Reviews
Can we log off the longest leash? The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. By John Freeman (Scribner, 2009, 244 pp. $25 U.S. $32.99 Can.)
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here’s something sad about an empty inbox. It makes us feel bereft and unwanted. The beep on our screens is our constant reminder that “we are needed,” writes John Freeman in The Tyranny of E-Mail. We are, in short, addicted. “Our desk is Grand Central and we are the conductor, and it feels good. Why? If we’re this busy, clearly we’re needed; we have purpose,” he says. This is not just another rant by a techno-challenged Luddite complaining about the cyber-takeover of our lives. Freeman has crafted a readable history of human communication, from clay tablets to the telegraph to today’s relentless bing on our computer screens, and points out how each successive step has made a difference to how we live, think and relate to one another. E-mail may be fast and convenient, he says, but its wizardry has made us lazier, lonelier and less articulate. He lays out a case for why we should step back and re-engineer a style of communication that is more selective and sociable. After tracing the rise of technological communication, from the Gutenberg Press to the manual typewriter that Mark Twain first used commercially to write a novel, Freeman discourses on the ways e-mail’s stranglehold has changed the way we live. “We work in the most distraction-prone workplace in the history of mankind. We The Marketplace July August 2010
can be reached on the phone, by fax, instant message, Facebook, text message, cellular phone, letter, and occasionally in person. Throughout the day, for many people and especially for the very busy, these various channels and machines are blinking and beeping like an ambulance trying to cross a busy intersection at rush hour.” Studies show many corporate
It has pulverized our days into bitesized moments of attention and strangled our work like a creeper vine on steroids
workers receive 200 e-mails a day, and the average office worker is interrupted 11 times an hour. How ever do we get any real work done? Freeman calculates the cost of these interruptions, in
which e-mail plays a large role, as nearly $600 billion in the United States alone. “The technology that was supposed to set us free to work from anywhere, to check in and clock out on our own time, has now become the longest employee leash ever invented because we can’t seem to log off,” he says, adding, “it has become our iron lung.” It’s not just Luddites who agree with him. He quotes the CEO of a major airline who calls his BlackBerry “the proverbial blessing and curse. It’s a blessing because it liberates you from the office. It’s a curse because there’s no escape.” And then there’s the university professor who has given up e-mail completely because he needs long periods of study and concentration, denied by the leash of e-mail. The professor’s response takes on added heft since he teaches at Stanford, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. And the discipline for which he needs
Our rolling to-do list “Our inboxes have usurped the morning paper as a shaping context; many of us check it before we even glance at the news, let alone brew that first cup of coffee, making our daily e-mail (and by extension ourselves) the most important information — the shaping context — of the day. This is an important development. From dawn to dusk, e-mail has become a kind of rolling to-do list that, as more and more information is provided to us electronically ... stretches across all aspects of our life. If this is the first stream of information we dip into in the morning, we begin our days with a contracting sense of the world, rather than an expanding one.” — John Freeman
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