The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox
By John Freeman
Published October 20, 2009 (Hardcover) Scribner
I am thankful that the pinging has quieted — nearly — for this holiday. The sound of tiny little elves working on a railroad with teeny little spikes and hammers, resting for a change.
I finally yesterday turned off the sound of emails in my BlackBerry. Until then, it was an orchestra of pings between my Outlook and four different emails in my BB — all varied tones, of course. But today, Thanksgiving, I heard just three dozen ping into Outlook — which means I only have 6,256 emails to go.
Naturally the title The Tyranny of E-Mail attracted my eye. Bright red cover. How could it miss. The myth Sisyphus comes to mind — he kept rolling a large rock uphill, and just as the goal seemed nigh, the rock rolled back downhill. I’ve queried busy, smart authors – Chuck Palahniuk says write first, then answer emails. Another author friend says she gives herself 24-minutes in the morning to do email, and then she has to walk away. Why 24, I do not know, but says the system works for her. I, too, pluck out the important ones, which is how I wound up with 6,256 I really should answer/file/delete someday. Some authors only do email at night, so there is a sense of completion — one email not spawning three or four or ten more. The Tyranny of E-Mail says the average office worker fields two hundred emails every day. Yeah, that’d be nice. John Freeman — who, like me, gets up to 300 a day — writes “Information overload is a $650 billion drag on the US economy every year.”
And, because we don’t see the sender’s face, we misunderstand emails half the time! That grim stat from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, quoted in Tyranny. And, email is biologically addictive. How’s that for really sucking? Freeman says email is like playing the slots. There’s a payoff. Ping! Just shoot me.
Freeman: “We are at the beginning, not the end, of this problem.”
More than a complaint, Tyranny is a fascinating history of how we rolled out from clay envelopes in Turkey several thousand years ago through Kublai Khan and other military leaders to today’s speedy E’s. Freeman threads in charming and romantic mail stories — including historical stories like that of the Pony Express, which lasted just 18-months. He covers — among other improvements — the beginning of Time Zones, the impact of the telegraph, and the blooming of the newspaper industry, which now is in a demise. We learn who invented the Internet – not Al Gore, but he does have a piece of history with it. The first emails were sent in the early 60′s, with only two-percent of the popular emailing in 1992. By 2011, there will be 3.2 billion e-mail users. We also get Spam, cyberbullying, Facebook — and advice.
Advice! finally! Freeman has ten points — here are a few: just check your email twice a day, schedule a dinner date with a friend instead of sending a slew of emails, and schedule media-free time every day. We did that — went to the coast for Thanksgiving dinner — I checked my crackberry twice, I’ll admit – but the drive, the dinner, and the walk on the sand, as the tide pulled back — were deeply enriching.
Hope you had a wonderful day, too!
