Don’t Send

The latest commentary in the ongoing new media-old media debate is a book titled The Tyranny of E-mail by John Freeman. Since John Freeman (former National Book Critics Circle president and current Granta editor) also happens to be my older brother, this post will be more or less a puff piece. I posted back in February about a dream I had of my brother starring as a guest on the Today Show being interviewed by Meredith Vieira. This is more or less the second installment to that post.

A portion of Freeman’s book was published in The Wall Street Journal on August, 22nd, and it was called a ‘manifesto.’ Gosh, you would think my brother was the second incarnation of the unabomber or something! Actually, Freeman is quick to point out that he is not a Ludite, but rather a privacy and efficiency advocate. According to Freeman, email is culpable for our shorter attention spans because it interrupts our train of thought every 5 seconds. We are dependent on it the same way we are dependent on the sound bite and textspeak. Email, like all other rapid-fire and truncated forms of communication, gives rise to the Instant Replay and back-to-back commercials. It is part of the chatterbox of sounds and images vying for our senses, and it is both a contributing factor and a symptom of our cubicle existences. It is the zenith of technological progress in the realm of instant communication that cannot be surpassed, and this fact alone makes it worth examining. My brother examines these things in a sort of post-postmodern way (at least that is what I gleaned from the WSJ manifesto). In many ways The Tyranny of E-mail seems to be a segue to the next book John Freeman plans to write, a book about suburbia. Mmmmm, I can’t wait for that one.

But in the meantime, here is some of what we can expect from The Tryanny of E-mail:

“A large part of electronic commu­nication leads us away from the physical world. Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets and commu­nity meeting halls have suffered as a result of this development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system. Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don’t hear the murmur or rise and fall of conversation but the con­tinuous, insect-like patter of typing. The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation and neglect of the tangible commons.

This is a terrible loss. We may rely heavily on the Internet, but we cannot touch it, taste it or experience the indescribable feeling of togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interac­tion, from the reassuring sensation of being among a crowd of one’s neighbors. Seeing one another in these situations reinforces the importance of sharing resources, of working together, of bal­ancing our own needs with those of others. Online, these values become notions that are much more easily suspended to further our own self-interest. Not surprisingly, political movements that begin online must have a real-world component; otherwise they evaporate and dissolve into the blur of other activities.

It is almost impossible to navigate the Web without having to stutter-step around ads and blinking messages from sponsors. In using this tool so heavily, consumers aren’t just frying their attention spans, they’re forfeiting one of the large sources of information that comes from face-to-face interaction and business. A butcher can tell you which cuts of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if he is good, might not just remember your preferences—which an online retailer can do frighteningly well—but ask you how your mother has been doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions remind us that we are more than con­sumers; they remind us that we are part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.

If we spend our eve­ning online trading short messages over Facebook with friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the peo­ple we could turn to for solace, humor and friendship, not to mention the places we could go to do this. We trade the com­plicated reality of friendship for its vacuum-packed idea.”

Wow, cool stuff! Keep in mind that I don’t speak for my brother, nor do I entirely care very much about his moral point of view concerning email - I am more interested in the implications of said moral point of view. I myself happen to enjoy the streamlined efficiency of email and its various applications, and I employ it as frequently (albeit as carefully) as possible. But I admit that I am more easily entertained than my brother is. I like things that are new and shiny, I eat at chain restaurants often because I crave predictability and familiarity. I am part of the Dan Brown herd, the  blind following the blind. I do not necessarily think this is a bad thing, I am merely a product of my era much like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were products of their eras. But I also think right now is the best time in human history to be alive, and email is no doubt one of the countless reasons for this.

My brother, however, is a private person. I stopped sending him emails a few years ago after most of them went unanswered. He has little patience for communicating casually in this medium when a phone call might suffice. This is unfortunate because now he is a very hard person to reach. But this goes back to the point Freeman is trying to make in The Tyranny of E-mail about how we don’t need to be available to everyone 24-7 just because the technology exists to make us available all the time. In the “old days” of the 1980’s, doctors, statesmen and hommicide detectives were probably the only ones who might expect to get a page or a phone call in the middle of the night. But having an email account with your workplace might result in employees working long after the work day has ended, which induces faster burnout rates. All of this and more is covered in the book.

My brother mentions words like “speed” and “burnout” in his manifesto in a negative way, and this made me think of something. If some people’s brains are capable of working at extremely high rates of speed, is the technology of email necessarily a bad thing for them to incorporate into their lives? I thought of this because John Freeman is a man who never sleeps, and he doesn’t read books so much as he scans them. He is capable of juggling many tasks at once, like being the unpaid president of the NBCC while also making a living in Manhattan as one of the nation’s most prominent book critics. Freeman is capable of doing and performing so much with only one brain that it begs the question: why does he think we all need to slow down?

I do happen to know that John sometimes spent 2 hours per day answering emails during his tenure as the NBCC president. When I would visit him in New York, he spent the wee morning hours wading through a backlog of emails from all types of people ranging from work associates to fans. Obviously, with this kind of responsibility resting on your shoulders, it is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. As I watched tv or tried to sleep, I was reminded of my brother’s burden by the constant pattering coming from his keyboard. Often I would hear a tap interrupted by a pause, then another tap and a pause. This sound would repeat itself for several minutes as if played in a loop, signaling the authoritative action of an unnecessary or superfluous email message being deleted. The keyboard pattering, by comparison, sounded more optimistic, as if it was a relief for my brother to finally answer a legitimate email after reading nine wasteful ones.

In defense of my brother’s email tormentors, however, and as further evidence of Freeman’s bionic abilities, one could never anticipate what time-zone he was in at any given moment. Hence sending him an email at 3 am California time didn’t seem like such a sin if you might think he is currently in Germany on a cross-cultural tour to promote literature. What an even bigger surprise it must have been for the senders when they got an almost instantaneous reply too! But I couldn’t help thinking as my brother recounted his email nightmare to his family and talked of the book he planned to write about it, that he was somehow encouraging the inundation of virtual mail that consumed so much of his life by replying to just-received messages at 3 in the morning. Obviously this would tell the sender that he was in fact available 24-7, whereas waiting until the next day to read and respond to a new message might be the more wise thing to do if one doesn’t want to be hounded by email. My brother’s workaholic tendencies made him incapable of turning off, and he essentially became a human octopus. I can only wonder what went through his mind as he answered all those emails, what thoughts his brain formulated. He obviously must have discovered the limits and futility of virtual mail, mapping its paramenters as he sat there glued to his chair while his life whizzed by. He probably became adept at pointing out which emails could have easily been spared with a phone call, which ones were too long, too personal, too short.

The result of all this is The Tyranny of E-mail which not only analyzes the whole email phenomenon and tracks the history of written correspondence, but also seeks to edify email users about responsible use of the technology. It should be a good read with far-reaching implications. My last post was about how we need to put limits on what we say and I think it’s a coincidence that my brother has a forthcoming book about imposing limits on our virtual communication habits as well. This definitely is a time for 30-somethings to think more carefully about what they blurt out either in public or online. After all, we are now adults, and becoming an adult requires a lot of slowing down. Maturity means thinking before you say or do something, and the same rules apply to the virtual world. Fast thinking does not have a premium over slower, careful thinking; and in fact, the opposite may be true.