Did you go online on Christmas Day? I did, more than once. The Internet, I admit, is a big part of my life. News, weather, music, advice about the guinea pig – it's all there for me. Checking e-mail is pretty much the first thing I do in the morning, and the last thing I do at night.
And like the alcoholic who needs “only” three drinks a day, drawing the line at four, I can always find others worse afflicted than I am. The people who check their BlackBerrys on dinner dates or during concerts, for instance, or sleep with them on the next pillow. People who update their Facebook status at every mood change. The ones who desperately need an Internet café while on holiday or, worse, can't leave their laptops at home. Those people have a problem, not me.
The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox, by John Freeman, Scribner, 244 pages, $32.99
So when I picked up this book, it seemed geared to someone of my ilk: sufficiently invested in the electronic age to be aware of its downsides, but smug enough to enjoy stories of other folks' folly.
The author, John Freeman, acting editor of the literary magazine Granta, has clearly thought a great deal about the impact of the Internet on our lives. And judging by the jacket photo – he looks all of 30 – he's not just some crotchety old codger who yells at his answering machine. Indeed, the way he describes electronic communication suggests he really understands e-mail's essence: “The tide of your inbox [is] always rising,” he writes, and “failing to respond to a sender can lead to a swift breakdown in trust.”
About 50 per cent of the time we misunderstand the tone of what we're receiving
He also provides convincing data, in case you were in any doubt, that e-mail has invaded and changed our lives. The average office worker today sends and receives 200 e-mails a day, he reports, which takes up roughly 40 per cent of our working life. Both in and out of the office, that adds up to about 35 trillion messages a year, and it's growing. The bad news is that about 50 per cent of the time we misunderstand the tone of what we're receiving – that's 17.5 trillion misunderstandings – emoticons notwithstanding.
This book yearns to be a philosophical musing on how e-mail has altered our very existence, but alas, it is not. What it is, exactly, is harder to say. At the beginning, when I was reading about love poems carved into wax, the Pony Express and the postcard craze, it felt like a history. The part about the lost art of letter-writing was more of a lament. The chapter titled This is Your Brain on E-mail felt like a stab at science writing.
A little later, the book starts to sound like a treatise on inequality. Freeman calls the Internet “the largest imagined community ever built,” but he complains that it is an especially exclusive one. The poor and the elderly are being systematically left out of the revolution, he tells us, and that's part of electronic communications' dark side. “[T]o be online you need money. You need a job that provides a computer, or you must own one; you must possess computer literacy, which isn't always available for people who drop out of school or do not get schooled at all. … In this sense, the Internet and e-mail, while designed to make the world ever more connected, reinforce the already existing gaps.”
That immediately brought to mind my Ukrainian relatives, who, with the help of my 80-year-old father, taught me how to use Skype.
Toward the end, the book veers toward confessional – it turns out Freeman has had a brush with e-mail overuse – and it culminates, as you might expect, within the genre of self-help. His advice is underwhelming and even a little irritating. In addition to “check it twice a day” and “read the entire incoming e-mail before replying,” he admonishes, “if you have to work as a group by e-mail, meet your correspondents face to face.”
Doesn't he get it? One of the wonders of e-mail is that you don't have to do that any more. Just last week, the people on my street co-ordinated six weeks of food drops for a neighbour in need, with only a few key strokes each; last month, some fellow foreign correspondents and I drafted a letter complaining about some late and missing payments without so much as picking up the phone, let alone meeting in person.
Opinion mixed with fact, rambling bits of history, a dash of personal experience and insight, and a manifesto for how we can all deal better with this vice? For all its condemnation of the electronic age, The Tyranny of E-mail actually resembles nothing so much as a clever blog.
Alison Motluk is a freelance writer based in Toronto. As of this writing, she has 1,087 messages in her inbox.
