Reviews

Can we log off the longest leash?

The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Jour-

ney to Your Inbox. By John Freeman (Scribner, 2009, 244 pp. $25 U.S. $32.99 Can.)

There’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 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

chunks of concentrated study? Computer science, no less.

Freeman, an e-mail user himself, feels keenly the contradictions of being tethered to, yet frustrated by the commanding presence of technology. “None of us can change the system on our own,” he says. “We simply cannot stop ourselves.”

Having said that, he emphasizes that we all need to back up and behold a fullfrontal view of the emperor’s nakedness. We need to “step back to look at the social implications of our ever-proliferating, ever-accelerating forms of communication technology. It’s a task that is harder than ever, given how e-mail has pulverized our days into bite-sized moments of attention.... If we don’t pause to think about whether we need this tool available to us all the time, it will strangle our workdays like a creeper vine on steroids and keep us tied to our machines and our inboxes right up until we crawl into bed.”

Beyond the tyranny of the short leash, and the way it fragments our attention spans, Freeman sees lasting implications for literacy. “Empirical evidence is flooding in regarding the ways that screen-based reading, which has grown from e-mail, is changing the way we read generally,” he writes. “Eye-tracking studies have shown that people increasingly tend to leapfrog over long blocks of text. We need bullet points, bold text, short sentences, explanatory subheads, and speedy text. People skim and scan rather than rummage down into the belly of the beast.”

And then there are deeper metaphysical considerations that may or may not matter to any but the most earnest thinkers. “Many of us who work in offices don’t touch a single natural substance all day long, from the plastic keyboard to the mesh fibers on the back of our chair to the faux lacquered tables in conference rooms,” he writes.

Lists of how to manage e-mail are as common as the bing of the inbox, and Freeman offers his own suggestions.

One is simple to utter, but not so easy to observe: Don’t go to your e-mail the moment you get up in the morning. “Checking your e-mail first thing at home doesn’t give you a jump on the workday; it just extends it,” he says. And once you’re at work, confine yourself to reading e-mails twice a day. “Staying true to the twice-a-day rule is critical for anyone who works in a job that requires sustained concentration,” he says.

Another “rule” is to ask yourself frequently — Is this e-mail really necessary? “Not sending e-mail — by which I mean sending a lot less of it — might be difficult at work, but your coworkers will thank you,” Freeman says. “Eighty percent of corporate e-mail problems are caused by one percent of workers who use it inefficiently; are you in that one percent? The survey that turned up this statistic showed that one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-sized message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion.” — Wally Kroeker