Four thousand years ago, somewhere in Mesopotamia, a prescient soul texted a lover. The sender memorized some verse, stirred up some clay, unsheathed his reed stylus, etched in the cuneiform script, baked the tablet in the sun, and lugged it to his heart-struck recipient. Today, in high tech and beyond, our messages are instantaneous and electronic, but that’s not necessarily progress.
“I think the speed with which we communicate changes things,” author John Freeman told customers last week at
RiverRun, Portsmouth’s bookstore. “We’ve reached terminal velocity with communication and we can’t keep up with the machines we’re communicating with….[E-mail] deprives us of deep thinking, either in the culture or with yourself.”
Freeman explores this development in his new book “
The Tyranny of E-Mail.” A few years ago, Freeman, now editor of the esteemed
Granta literary journal, had been receiving 300 e-mails a day, more than he could process. Sound familiar? The deluge extended his work day, robbed him of sleep and snuffed out relationships. “It’s about time for an intervention,” he thought. So he wrote the book.
The title says “e-mail,” but it stands for the larger family of easy instant communication. Among the victims of e-mail, according to Freeman:
Community: The more “virtual” that e-mail makes institutions like banks, post offices and bookstores, the more they fade away from the neighborhood. And the fewer reasons to walk down the street and see your neighbor.
Culture: It’s too easy to have misunderstandings on e-mail, exacerbate the problems with further e-mail, and watch relationships devolve into icy stalemates. Even when e-mail sustains friendships, it leaves us with nothing to say when we do meet face to face.
Well-being: We check our e-mail before our first cup of coffee, at stop lights (ahem), all day at work (bathroom visits, included), after we’ve climbed into bed – and, of course, on vacation. Says Freeman, “There’s no downtime anymore.”
Mental health: When the server goes down, workers tend to click manically or assault their computing devices. “We used to work to live; now we work to e-mail.”
Brain chemistry: Scientists compare e-mail with slot machines. The reward – whether a good news message or a jackpot– comes intermittently and randomly. The technical term is variable interval reinforcement schedule. The only way to get a reward is to keep pulling the lever.
Eyes: What is the effect on our optic nerves of processing all the artificial light from our constant stream of electronic messages? In the olden days, reading involved natural light reflecting off an organic surface.
Literature. Though Freeman liked the publishing sensation “
Eat, Pray, Love,” which has spent 141 weeks on the New York Times bestseller
list, it’s probably no coincidence that it’s written in 108 bite-size chapters. Is that what we want? In recent fiction, Freeman has detected a “casualness and antsy type of speed… an insinuating quality.” Going with the flow, he readily admits he included plenty of subheads in “The Tyranny of E-Mail” on purpose: “Because I want to change the way people think, I wrote it in a way that is most digestible.”
So what's the answer? You may have heard of Slow Food, the antidote to fast food that focuses on fresh, local, organic, traditional cooking and eating. Freeman is calling for something like that in human conversation.
If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles that have been lost in the blur. It is time to launch a manifesto for a slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the forces that encourage us to remain connected to them.
Although Freeman is decrying e-mail’s tyranny, he’s not calling for its assassination:
Many of the values of the Internet are social improvements – it can be a great platform for solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the manifesto of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto.
The manifesto has 10 tenets. I love number one: Don’t send. Freeman doesn’t mean don’t ever send. Just don’t go out of your way to create e-mail bloat with “thanks” messages, unnecessary forwards, micro reports, or provocative statements that are sure to spark discussions better held offline. After all...
As most people now know, e-mail only creates more e-mail, so by stepping away from the messaging treadmill, even if for a moment every day, you instantly dial down the speed of the e-mail messagopolis.
Hmm, don’t send.
To see the next nine tenets of the manifesto, join me in turning off your Blackberry or iPhone and opening the book. Here, watch me turn it off… I’m turning it off ... right … now… oops, just one second.
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